Plainly, it’s rare to see creativity and imagination in Hollywood today. The field of animation in particular has often been marred by boring and repetitive entries that don’t do anything more than offer paltry laughs and thin storylines. That’s why The Lego Movie felt like such a breath of fresh air. In addition to the inventive animation, it was stunningly original, genuinely funny and packed to the gills with likeable characters. Needless to say, we’re excited to see what directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller have in mind for The Lego Movie 2, which they won’t helm (that’s being left to Chris McKay) but which they’re currently hard at work figuring out a story for.
Unfortunately, it seems the pair are having trouble with finding a natural way to continue the story. While speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Lord and Miller admitted that it has been tough to find a way to follow up The Lego Movie, given how much imagination they poured into that movie. They were quoted as saying:
Phil Lord: [It’s] still in the stage where we’re sitting around talking about things and trying to figure out how to craft a story.
Chris Miller: We have a lot of themes and some ideas that we like.
Lord: One of the problems we made for ourselves is the brand of the movie is originality. So it’s really hard to sequelize that.
It’s definitely understandable that coming up with a fresh and enjoyable story for The Lego Movie 2 represents a major hurdle for the filmmakers. After all, Lord and Miller ran into the same challenge with 22 Jump Street, next week’s sequel to their 2012 hit 21 Jump Street. The pair eventually opted for self-parody, skewering the very idea of sequels on that film, which our reviewer Matt Donato found only worked some of the time.
Duplo got an intro at the end of The Lego Movie, but Lord and Miller also essentially blew up the construct that made the first film possible by admitting that nothing that had happened in the movie was real. So it’s anyone’s guess as to whether Lord and Miller will succeed in finding a way to move past that. However, Warner Bros. is going to demand The Lego Movie 2 even if they can’t, so let’s hope for the sake of the franchise that the pieces fall into place soon enough.