
Personally...
..I'm waiting for the El Reg playmobil re-enactment montage, in the style of full-length robot chicken features.
Naturally, it would be rated 18...
Film studio Warner Bros has given the green light to its animated Lego movie, which is now expected to be released in 2014. Harry Potter Lego game poster (click to enlarge) Credit: Warner/TT Games The studio has struck up a deal with the Aussie special effects cartoon house Animal Logic, which put together movies like Happy …
. . .we used to get wooden performances.
Though nowadays some people have had a lot of 'work' done so they are half way there to Lego already.
'The hybrid movie, a much-maligned platform that arguably only worked once for Who Framed Roger Rabbit 23 years ago'
"I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way"
"I wonder if they've thought about the merchandising opportunities here?"
I'm pretty sure you'll find that that was the point of the whole operation from the beginning. The original pitch would have been something along the lines of "Lets do something with lego, we'll be able to make millions from the lego sets"
Let's use "worked" in the sense of "wasn't ridiculously shite", shall we? Which pretty much discounts Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Mary Poppins or anything similar. You have musicals, which are almost all shite. And you have people interacting with animated stuff, which are almost all shite (even today - Tom Cruise's War of the Worlds, or Battle of Los Angeles, anyone?). At the intersection, the probability of shiteness is close enough to 1 that even a homeopathy supporter might say "hang on a minute, chaps, I'm not sure about this".
Err... Just because YOU don't like musicals doesn't mean they are automatically "shite". Take "High School Movie" for example. I thought it was horrid, and the massive continuity flaw in the final number where boy starts singing his piece instead of helping girl take her cue - hello?! However, it was quite popular and led to two more films in the series, and a number of rip-offs. Discerning movie viewers might think "oh my God", however their popularity no doubt translated directly into cold hard cash. Therefore, I postulate the equation that "shite != shite if payback == good", a theory that might go some way to explain a lot of movies...
For every Mad Max there's a Waterworld. For every Michael Jackson there's a Justin Bieber. For every cat there's a dog. All neither here nor there as arguments --- 95% of everything is crud.
And the howler "platform that arguably only worked once" --- as shouted before, millions of Mary Poppins fans would disagree (Bedknobs Etc is more of an... acquired taste?).
As a purely Lego movie, in the style of the computer games, and those fantastic short movies that were around the web a few years ago, it'd be brilliant.
But mixing in live action? It's going to be horrific. It'll be like a Power Rangers movie or worst yet, the horrific car crash that was the Garbage Pail Kids movie :(
Roger Rabbit definitely made it work, but everything else.... wait, doesn't Avatar count as a mix of animated and live action? Then again, Roger Rabbit was still better than that, so your original point still stands.
But that movie plus "Bedknobs and Broomsticks" were both kind of disappointing really. Mary Poppins is a classic, but its really not a mix of live action and animation with the one exception of the "jump into the chalk sketch" scene.
So Roger Rabbit it is!!
Q: "So what do you see in him, anyway?"
A: "He makes me laugh"
What's new here? There already a number of computer-animated films featuring the Lego mini-figures, not all of them shorts. Eg. "The Adventures of Clutch Powers" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1587414/) and the funny Star Wars spoof "The Padawan Menace" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2005268/). These are surprisingly fun to watch even if you are not 5 years old (like my son is, the prime reason I have gone for Lego lore...)
I guess the newsworthy (or at least press-release-worthy) aspect here was the involvement of a major film studio.
"a risky move for the existing audience for Lego, ie, kids, hypercritical adult gaming fanbois, and even more hypercritical adults who loved Lego as a kid"
Whilst I appreciate the usual light-hearted attitude of The Reg - and have done since I started reading it about 4 years ago or more - I am slightly dismayed by your assertion that all Lego fans fall into the above groups.
I regard myself as a fairly well balanced individual, and I'm sure that a large majority of the hundreds of thousands of other AFOLs (Adult Fans Of Lego) would regard themselves in the same light.
Perhaps a better understanding of your audience might be in order before making sweeping generalisations