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Lego Wants To Make Live-Action Movies — But How?

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We wish we had a personal pipeline to the Hollywood studios, but we don’t. So whenever we hear something particularly odd coming out of one of them, we can’t dial someone up and ask “what is this even supposed to mean?” It would really help in this situation.

Lego movies and TV shows have been around for quite a while. The Lego Movie, it’s sequels, the Lego Ninjago TV show, the Lego Star Wars specials on Disney+, and more. Most recently Pharrell Williams released his own biography, Piece By Piece, rendered entirely with Lego bricks and figures. What’s the one thread all these things have in common, besides Legos? They’re all animated.

Animation would seem like an inevitability if you’re making a Lego movie, but Universal just announced today a deal with Lego to make three different “live-action” movies. That’s the specific term they used. The movies will be directed by Joe Cornish (Attack the Block), Jake Kasdan (the newer Jumanji movies), and Patty Jenkins (Wonder Woman) respectively — one to a movie.

What are they talking about here? If they mean stop-motion, that’s not really live-action, even if it occurs in the “real” world. The keyword is “live” — stop-motion is done one frame at a time. Are they thinking of dressing up real people in garish Lego outfits and having them waddle around? That would be embarrassing, but Hollywood is not above it.

Or is this like the upcoming Minecraft movie where a bunch of real kids are superimposed into CG backgrounds, magically transported into Legoland to learn how to deal with their parents’ divorce? If so, why wouldn’t they take the negative response to the Minecraft trailer into account? And why would you greenlight three of this type of film at once?

As far as we know, none of the three films are connected. Universal just wants to instantly oversaturate the market with three Lego movies in close proximity, all of them in “live-action.” None of this makes any sense at all. We’ll follow up if we ever get some clarity.

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