When The Lego Movie dropped 10 years ago, it did not light the world on fire in a zealous, sincere-with-a-dash-of-irony exaltation of corporate creativity to the extent that Barbie did some months back. It didn’t even land an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature. But the peppy, smartly written and self-reflexive take on unimaginative play (also starring Will Ferrell as a tyrannical, controlling businessman…) made a huge mark, and it wasn’t hard to see why.
The Lego Movie was gorgeously animated, aping the jumpy, tactile texture of Lego stop-motion, it was incredibly funny and thoughtful, and it captured the connective joy of building and playing with Lego with piercing, loving accuracy. And yet its legacy in corporate cinema culture still feels unexcavated; too readily did audiences dismiss its clear commercial subtext with a hand-waving, “If only all commercials were as good as this!” and the reflection that Lego was a company everybody liked.
That The Lego Movie wanted to, first and foremost, sell Legos was neither a shock nor insidious. Any film based on intellectual property is effectively a commercial. Every franchise entry, every legacy sequel, every toy movie that needs to invent its story from whole cloth, and every sequel they make to James L. Brooks’ Terms of Endearment (so far, just one, but keep your guard up nevertheless)—these films are all selling something beyond their characters, performances and flashy, recognizable costumes. Every IP film is selling something beyond the enjoyment of its story: The virility and longevity of the brand.
In an IP film, characters are not just people with motives and arcs, they are extensions of something sellable, and exist because those owning the IP have reverse-engineered (or, have paid creatives to reverse-engineer) a way to prop up the market value of their property in the cultural space. Beyond paying for movie tickets, loving one of these films is seen as consent for it being further milked.
This sounds like an oversimplification, one that eagerly pushes the minute hand closer to midnight on the Doomsday Clock over nothing more than a Lego movie, but the blatancy of The Lego Movie’s branding after another meta-yet-heartfelt toy movie just rocketed all the way to the box office hall of fame and the Academy Awards is worth unpacking.
Clearly, we’re happier when you are upfront about your messaging: Audiences have long voiced their outrage at being pitched brand products in Michael Bay’s Transformers movies, despite the franchise being one massive commercial for Reagan-era plastic toys. We saw a repeat of this in Barbie; audiences got more riled up at the mid-movie chase selling cars than the entire movie selling Barbies. Cinematic advertisement is only acceptable when it has something meaningful to say and doesn’t feel like a con.
But beyond the thin line The Lego Movie walks between commercial and critique, audiences were clearly just happy to see an adventure movie set in a world of Lego.
In the city of Bricksburg, Emmet (Chris Pratt) is a cheerful but unextraordinary construction worker who, through contact with the cap to a Krazy Glue tube (which is being used by Lord Business (Will Ferrell) to stop Lego minifigures and builds from moving independently) is confused with a chosen one known as “The Special” by a guild of minifigures from Lego’s illustrious history and many licensed brand tie-ins. Along with the badass warrior Wildstyle (Elizabeth Banks), wise sage Vitruvius (Morgan Freeman), Batman (Will Arnett), and a classic Lego spaceman Benny (Charlie Day), Emmet embarks on a fast-paced and vividly animated adventure to save Lego-kind.
As is revealed in a real-world sequence where Ferrell appears as a dad who doesn’t let his kid play with his expensive model cities, the real villain is not the self-aware company behind the product being marketed, but consumers who are overly controlling and defensive about the product. The Lego Movie is telling people who play with Lego wrong to lighten up.
It’s difficult to tell whether The Lego Movie or the tie-in sets depicting events from the movie that Lego released are to be considered the supplement—if the film exists to encourage the merits of building and playing with Lego, was it created to promote the Lego sets that were released to promote the movie? Before we get lost in a plastic ouroboros, we can reflect on the novelty of a product film earnestly selling the virtues of the toy and getting away with it purely because its infectious fun and thoughtful themes, if nothing else, capture what we love about the product. It may not be subversive, but after a year of films like Air, Flamin’ Hot and Tetris that celebrate CEOs and salesmen over the creations themselves (especially since 2023 reminded us once again that no CEO anywhere deserves lionizing), The Lego Movie still seems like the gold standard.
The reason The Lego Movie has not been subjected to the ire that Barbie received—despite the same amount of care, heart and wit being put into it, while its commercial bent was far more naked—is threefold. Firstly, The Lego Movie didn’t prioritize an older audience like Barbie did (the PG-13 rating of the latter cuts out a lot of people who care most ardently about Barbie dolls in the here and now) and therefore didn’t inherently invite criticism from a more politically astute crop of moviegoers. Secondly, The Lego Movie wasn’t the biggest movie of the year, being beaten by forgettable tentpoles like Maleficent and Rio 2, and therefore wasn’t considered fair game to lambast and tear apart. But most importantly, The Lego Movie is a scrappy, vibrant adventure before it’s a commentary on real-world social politics. Barbie’s eagerness to engage with feminist messages attracted loud, critical backlash from the minute it dropped in movie theaters—in good and bad faith.
But just because, at the end of the day, there are more important things to do than perform close political readings on The Lego Movie doesn’t mean that the corporations that produced it get to go unscrutinized. By bankrolling a heartfelt, dazzlingly realized film about the way its product is played with, Lego invested in its own mythos, deliberately separating the emotional relationship consumers have with these bricks from the conditions of their production.
Lego has always rejected making toy replicas of firearms and military weapons…except for the many instances where it was financially beneficial to do so, or where they could bend their founding pacifist ethos by producing sci-fi or fantasy weaponry for their characters. Producing billions of tiny blocks of non-biodegradable plastic yearly is, shockingly, not a net positive for the environment, especially when Lego’s attempts to thwart killing the planet with bricks involve mining assets in the global south and abandoning plans to make them from recycled materials.
We cannot expect a sanitized commercial like The Lego Movie to meaningfully spin these uncomfortable truths into productive solutions, but they are useful for parsing the film as a form of corporate mythmaking. And even looking at the film itself, credible allegations of toxic work culture and punishing labor conditions have been recently made against Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s animation productions. When your narrative theme is that of creative joy needing to be celebrated, things get complicated when the laborers who created the film were not permitted the harmonious experience being preached.
The Lego Movie may not have flirted with Oscar gold, but did ignite a respectable franchise—Batman and Ninjago spin-offs were followed by a straight sequel and a Will Arnett-hosted competition series. But none of them reached the heights of that first film—a film which, in the 10 years since its release, has never been the subject of as much analytical scrutiny as Barbie has received in six months. But the two films should be seen as a dyad of commercial cinema. We understand how companies promote their assets best by looking at films that are huge successes, by looking at how cinematic language and emotional drama are leveraged to present a selective narrative on how to feel about the product.
The Lego Movie, like Barbie, asks us to simplify how we look at the product, to flatten its nuances and complications into a version that looks like it accounts for its flaws, but really just enforces the strength of the brand. What The Lego Movie introduced in 2014, Barbie has weaponized, pushing the playful-but-executive-approved self-criticism to its limits to the tune of over a billion dollars. It’s not about whether The Lego Movie is a better film than Barbie, but rather, if Barbie is an evolution of The Lego Movie, what on earth will come next?
Rory Doherty is a screenwriter, playwright and culture writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can follow his thoughts about all things stories @roryhasopinions.