Hollywood’s current zeal for building films around game and toy properties that have no discernible narrative has reached a natural apotheosis with Warner Bros.’ upcoming movie based on Legos, those inherently formless and adaptable playthings that can be shaped into whatever your imagination desires, particularly if it’s a laser gun or something to asphyxiate on. The studio has been building its live-action/CGI hybrid Lego movie since at least 2008, pausing a couple of times to smash it against the wall in frustration when it started to look sort of crappy, but has finally decided to pull out an instruction sheet and stick to it—Lego metaphors!—by targeting a 2014 release date, and putting a creative team together that now includes Robot Chicken director Chris McKay, who will share filmmaking duties with the previously announced Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.
And while it’s practically a Robot Chicken parody in itself, this idea of movie producers scraping the bottom of the proverbial toy chest and coming up with a few scattered Lego blocks (because Weirdly Moldy Showbiz Pizza Token would be a much harder sell), bringing in McKay to work with the duo behind the forthcoming 21 Jump Street suggests that the film will probably wink at some of the shamelessness of this pop-culture scavenging, which makes it okay, sort of. Or it could follow the Cloudy model of balancing subversive humor with a heartfelt message about, uh, how everyone has another piece out there that fits them perfectly, unless they’re one of those stupid cone things.