Last night, I paid $14 to see a 100-minute long commercial in 3D. I’m far from alone. So far, people across the country have paid more than $185 million for the same privilege, which has made The Lego Movie the most popular movie in America for the past three weeks. It has also received near universal critical acclaim. After I left the cinema it seemed funny to me that as the rise of native advertising in online media prompts more outcry at a dying industry supposedly selling its soul and misleading its readers to save its bottom line, the biggest movie of the year is an overtly branded vehicle made with no regard to the boundary between content creator and brand. The Lego Movie is not subtle in its embrace of the corporate spirit, but who cares? It's native advertising for miniature blocks on an epic scale starting with the title. I assumed that, and a few dozen real world marketing tie-ins and product launches, would be the end of it. But the film is loaded with brand messages about the transformative power of Lego and the power of creativity.
I won’t spoil the plot such as it is, but the ending breaks the fourth wall to directly spell out these brand themes in real life and show how Lego brings families closer together. It's an advertisement that plays out its plot at movie-length rather than 45 seconds. Some might defend the branded content piece of the equation by arguing that Warner Bros. execs decided on their own to make a Lego Movie and Lego, naturally, is simply playing along for commercial gain. Before the film’s release, Bloomberg profiled the exhaustive back and forth during the development of the movie between Dan Lin, producer, and Jill Wilfert, Lego’s VP for licensing and entertainment. Massaging Lego’s brand image was key to the entire endeavor. “If we tell a great story, it can have a halo effect for your brand,” Lin recalls telling the Lego execs. Wilfert too speaks in fluent corporate-speak. “The focus is first and foremost on the brand and delivering quality content that is communicating our values,” she says.
Lego and Warner Bros. debated everything from whether Lego characters could kiss to how edgy the jokes could be to make the movie more entertaining to an adult audience. Lin tells Bloomberg the Lego team was "very influential on story, script, every major casting decision, every director decision.” The rub is, it’s actually a fun film. I'm nearly 30 and it played off my own nostalgia for Lego, making good use of Lego’s dizzying array of product licenses to rope in characters like Batman, Superman, Shaquille O’Neal, and Abraham Lincoln into a silly, yet sharply written cultural pastiche. The creators of the Lego Movie worked with Lego to tell a story about its brand in the same way as every publication from the New York Times to Buzzfeed is working with their advertisers. The result was executed on a much larger scale and stage and was something that people wanted to see and pay for. The key, is openness. No one was tricked or misled. There was no mystery this morning why I felt favorably toward the Lego corporation.
Through being so open in its motivations the Lego Movie is less insidious than something like last year’s ‘Man of Steel,’ which pocketed $170 million from over 100 product tie ins or Heineken paying $45 million for James Bond to drink their beer instead of a Martini in ‘Skyfall.’ Not every brand has the deep roots into the lives of its audience that Lego has. No audience will warm to the Walmart or Taco Bell movie in similar fashion. Brand affinity gave the The Lego Movie leverage to be a $65 million seamlessly constructed native advertisement that made no bones about what it was. But it is so well made we’ve spent coming on a month now handing over money and clapping along. It proves, for better or worse, that we can drink content from the corporate fountain and enjoy it. [illustration by Brad Jonas for Pando]The genius behind The LEGO Movie is also the reason every subsequent LEGO movie—starting with The LEGO Batman Movie and surely a dozen movies to follow—is destined to be a little bit worse.
The LEGO Movie was fresh and different. But it could only work once, because you can only wink and nudge as often as that movie did—incessantly, compulsively, like a happy eager dog wagging its tail—so many times before the joke starts to try our patience. The LEGO Movie felt like the product of two guys, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who had spent their whole lives having every pop culture meme beamed directly into their brains before returning them all to the world in a glorious hellzapoppin seizure-inducing delirium. The movie let them play in every little kids’ sandbox; you could almost see their disbelief that they were being allowed to have this much fun. But the thing about a sequel or a spinoff, even a mostly fun one like The LEGO Batman Movie, is that it’s hard to recreate enthusiasm and inventiveness. What was once new is now, already, routine. This one is a spinoff about Batman, the breakout star of the first film (as much as one of the most popular and most dramatized characters in the last 100 years can be a “breakout”).
Voiced by Will Arnett, he is every doctoral philosophy student obsessed with “darkness” you’ve ever met, only with billions of dollars, fantastic crime-fighting gadgets, and “fully jacked abs.” (Batman informs us he’s so jacked he has an extra ab to make nine.) This Batman is beloved by Gotham for constantly saving it from The Joker (a funny, fun Zach Galifianakis), but goes home to an empty house and no family, save his reliable butler Alfred (Ralph Fiennes, proving every great British actor on the planet will end up at some point playing Alfred Pennyworth). After The Joker turns himself in to new police commissioner Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson), Batman/Bruce Wayne has to deal with accidentally adopted orphan Dick Grayson (Michael Cera), while trying to figure out if he will ever be less alone. This is a lot to put on a Batman, this Belonging Arc, particularly one who is scowling in toy form. Arnett’s character was a blast in the original film because it mocked the traditional notion of Batman—the brooding, self-conscious tortured vigilante act— while still presenting Batman as pretty much the coolest dude on the planet.
Giving him a traditional story arc as a leading man doesn’t do him or Arnett that many favors: This Batman might be funner in smaller doses.In fact, for all the self-referential touches this movie throws in—at one point, we get a short LEGO version of every Batman movie ever made—this Batman doesn’t even particularly resemble Batman, neither the traditional one nor the alpha bro of The LEGO Movie. He’s just a traditional, straight-out-of-Robert-McKee protagonist: He starts out somewhere, meets someone who changes him, learns a lesson, and ends up in a different place from where he started. The movie waves all sorts of jangly keys at you, but this is as basic and hoary a story as Batman has ever helmed. He had more quirks in the Joel Schumacher movies. Which is to say: You can only meta pop-culture speed-riff for so long before you inevitably start making a normal movie like everybody else. The LEGO Movie had a deceptively sweet, almost profound metaphysical trick at its core: When we pan back and realize that the evil President Business is, in fact, a boring old dad played by Will Ferrell who has lost his sense of play and creativity, it turned the film into something larger than we thought it was, something almost nostalgic and hopeful.
But there is no larger universe here, no boy playing with his toys. We’re just playing straight up with brands. (This is the sort of movie where Siri plays herself.)Thus, a little bit of the original’s charm can’t help but fall away. The spinoff feels less like a deconstruction of our pop culture icons than a repackaging of them. Want a friendlier Batman than the lunatic murderbot of Zach Snyder’s awful films? The movie functions not only as a cute exploration of the Batman story, but as a cleanup of a damaged corporate asset. To be fair, it’s a valuable asset, and the movie certainly has its fair share of fun: This is without question the most lovable Robin has ever been. (It helps that the film essentially turns him into an anime character.) The movie still has plenty of life and vigor, even if it’s just left over from the previous film, and while the jokes run out of steam in the overly busy final half-hour, there are still some pretty great ones throughout. (I’m particularly fond of Frat Bro Superman, voiced by Channing Tatum.