The LEGO Brick Race

[Cut the Kragle]

5 hours ago, Oky said:

Uhm, what kind of "SJW points" did TLM2 score exactly?  The movie is about siblings learning to play together and, as the movie puts it, "the death of imagination in the subconscious of an adolescent," and it was plenty entertaining to me. There's nothing SJW about it except for a hint of feminism, but that only ever came up in 1 or 2 scenes. Hardly a detractor for the movie, let alone a reason for the Brick Race to be cancelled. Franchise fatigue and the sequel's late arrival are much more likely reasons.

One of the most frequently played TV spots focused on a scene where Emmett is belittled in a misguided attempt at promoting "feminism" (I use inverted commas because true feminism is about equality) - "So, you fought and master-built and kicked butt, and then the hapless male was the leader?" There's no doubt in my mind that this played a part in the film's poor turnout by putting off a lot of its core target audience, (i.e. young boys).

I've heard from many of my friends and coworkers that they felt the movie was too preachy and pandering. And also that their kids got bored and didn't like the new characters.

The first movie had a simple message it wanted to send and everything in that movie works together to convey that message. This felt a lot more like they were just blanket-bombing trending topics in an attempt to be relevant and appear virtuous in the current social climate. 

Like I said, I think a bunch of bad decisions are to blame, more than any one thing.

[Renny The Spaceman]

3 hours ago, Cut the Kragle said:

their kids got bored and didn't like the new characters.

That's probably because (besides Watevra) most of the new characters weren't too zany (Personality-wise, a talking Ice-cream cone is plenty zany from a design perspective) or funny like those in the first film and caused all but three of the first film's cast to be forgotten. 

[Lego David]

I... don't know how I feel about this.The Ninjago Movie and LEGO Movie 2 did pretty poorly at the box office, so I don't know if the LEGO Cinematic Universe business should keep going for much longer. Especially when the movie's only intention is just to promote the sets based on them.

[Digger of Bricks]

So, I suppose many of you here probably have already heard about this recent development by now...

Variety - Universal in Talks With Lego Group to Develop New Films Based on Toys (EXCLUSIVE)

While I've come to presume this automatically spells out the writing-on-the-wall for The Billion Brick Race, a part of me wonders if there's a chance the project might carry over to Universal, especially considering that producer Dan Lin (who helmed all four of WB's Lego Movies) is reported to continue overseeing any further cinematic features they may develop. It's also worth noting that a similar such move happened for Pacific Rim's 2018 sequel when producer Legendary Pictures moved from Warner Brothers over to Universal, taking the still in-development sequel along with it. 

I don't know, perhaps I'm just grasping at straws? 

[Lyichir]

For anyone curious, Jorge Gutierrez shared some of his character concepts for the movie here:

 

[Digger of Bricks]

16 minutes ago, Lyichir said:

For anyone curious, Jorge Gutierrez shared some of his character concepts for the movie here:

Whoa, thanks a billion for highlighting these here @Lyichir!!!  

Looks like despite being an original project, they wanted to go with "fleshies" for the characters as so to highlight the story's themes, as he puts it...

In the conversation, Jorge said he might highlight some conceptual vehicular designs too... 

[Robert8]

Quote

The film I wanted was a racing film about race, privilege and gentrification

Thank god that thing never saw the light of day

[Digger of Bricks]

For those who want a closeup embedded here rather than following the Twitter link...

[tafkatb]

That little bit of description makes it sound like this could have been pretty great... hopefully Gutiérrez will still be able to explore those themes in something else further down the road. (And maybe share some more details on Billion Brick Race in the meantime?)

[Lyichir]

20 hours ago, Robert8 said:

Thank god that thing never saw the light of day

You mean too bad... sounds like it could have been incredible.

[jamesster]

I'm curious what other directions the film may have been going in - the tweet describes it as his take on it, and it'd been in the works for a couple years before then:

https://www.cinemablend.com/news/1687930/legos-billion-brick-race-movie-has-a-new-director

Those character designs and premise seem like they'd be fairly personal to him, going by what little I've seen of his other work anyway - I wonder how many rewrites it went through? The Ninjago movie went through a lot of story overhauls as well... I wonder if we'll ever get to see more behind the scenes stuff, from either of them. Oh well.

Edited December 25, 2019 by jamesster

[Digger of Bricks]

15 hours ago, jamesster said:

I'm curious what other directions the film may have been going in - the tweet describes it as his take on it, and it'd been in the works for a couple years before then:

https://www.cinemablend.com/news/1687930/legos-billion-brick-race-movie-has-a-new-director

Those character designs and premise seem like they'd be fairly personal to him, going by what little I've seen of his other work anyway - I wonder how many rewrites it went through? The Ninjago movie went through a lot of story overhauls as well... I wonder if we'll ever get to see more behind the scenes stuff, from either of them. Oh well.

Maybe I'm being a bit too presumptuous, but from what Jorge has disclosed so far, it seems his take might not've even involved any kinda Lego Multiverse plot elements that I thought the story would concern itself with, staying put within only one setting. If so, then that had to have been the case with the initial pitch, right? 

[leafan]

On 12/24/2019 at 9:05 PM, Digger of Bricks said:

 

On 12/24/2019 at 9:27 PM, Robert8 said:

Thank god that thing never saw the light of day

Wow yes I agree. Just what we need; another politically charged, child in doctrination pile of bricks.

These Hollywood types can't seem to grasp that kids (or most people really) just want to have fun.

I do wonder what the future will bring now that Lego movies have moved over to Universal. I also wonder if the lore will connect? I doubt that part since the characters from TLM are probably owned by Warner Bros.

[Robert8]

Yeah, there is a reason the movie was canned: the plot sounds like a trainwreck all right. 

..............

Warner Bros can sell the LEGO cinematic universe all together to Universal, except for Batman of course. 

But if they dont, I dont really know what would happen with Emmet, Lucy, Queen Whatevra, Sweet Mayhem, etc.

Ninjago would be less troublesome since they are characters already created by TLG. So the only thing WB could own are the movie versions, if anything

Regarding Batman, maybe they could make a deal about using the character only in cameos or such, similar to the Spiderman thing. But I really doubt it since WB is very protective when it comes to Batman

[Renny The Spaceman]

I'm not AS opposed to where this film was going, I understand that morals have their place in kids media BUT this one seems to have no relation to the brand or product unlike the other 4 so would have probably wound up being a generic animated film with a ABS coat of paint (Plus it would star fleshies, yuck)

As for the fate of the the WB characters I'd assume that they revert to LEGO given how their used in their theme parks and website, if not they still would likely have the Ninjago crew and Benny to fall back on as they were LEGO characters first

 

Edited January 7, 2020 by Renny The Spaceman

[jamesster]

Would the licensing/ownership of the LEGO Movie characters and such actually be any different from the boatloads of other characters created in the same way? Pepper Roni and the rest of the main cast for LEGO Island, the Alpha Team characters, etc were all solely created by other companies for games they were contracted to develop, LEGO retained all the rights, and then they were used in set lines (and other things) produced after the games, without any involvement from the original creators. I think it may be a safe-ish assumption Clutch Powers came about in the same way - at the very least, LEGO's made further use of him in Ninjago recently... If WB had a deal with LEGO that worked differently than all those, that'd make them fairly unique.

[leafan]

9 hours ago, jamesster said:

Would the licensing/ownership of the LEGO Movie characters and such actually be any different from the boatloads of other characters created in the same way? Pepper Roni and the rest of the main cast for LEGO Island, the Alpha Team characters, etc were all solely created by other companies for games they were contracted to develop, LEGO retained all the rights, and then they were used in set lines (and other things) produced after the games, without any involvement from the original creators. I think it may be a safe-ish assumption Clutch Powers came about in the same way - at the very least, LEGO's made further use of him in Ninjago recently... If WB had a deal with LEGO that worked differently than all those, that'd make them fairly unique.

It all depends on their contract, but big film production companies tend to be clingy to their 'property'.

Those other instances you mention aren't on the same level as the characters from TLM.

[Fenghuang0296]

So I guess this is dead . . some of it looks really cool though. I kinda want to try making some of those characters as purist customs now. Anyone got any ideas how I’d go about that or want to do something similar?