Much as we tend to look back on the ’70s as the era of maverick auteurs, future generations may well regard the revolutionary ’10s as the decade of “Whee, toys!” As we grudgingly relayed last year, a film set in the “world of Lego” is in the planning stages, joining other comfortingly nostalgic, inner-child-swaddling projects like Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, Battleship, Magic 8-Ball, and There, There: Mommy Hugs You For 90 Solid Minutes. Today Heat Vision announced that Warner Bros. has finally found its Lego architects in Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the duo who previously stretched the children’s book Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs into a recession-era parable about the dangers of relying on technology and the empty promises of skyborne food.
It remains to be seen what sort of jumbled moral and political messages can be wrung out of Lego’s famed plastic building blocks (“It’s Toy Story meets The Fountainhead!”); all we know so far is that it will be a mix of live action and animation, and that Lord and Miller successfully won over the “extremely protective” Lego execs with their pitch, which means it’s already passed the modern artistic hurdle of being as innocuous as possible. (But whatever; it's for families, and everyone knows families will watch anything.) Unfortunately, we’ll just have to leave it there for now: Lord and Miller will only begin constructing their Lego film when they get done playing with the Jonah Hill-starring 21 Jump Street rehash we’ve also been warily tracking for two years now. Dudes, hurry up and validate our knee-jerk dismissal!