With more than $1 billion in worldwide box office revenue so far, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie is being hailed for, among other things, its highly original approach. But a closer look reveals some surprisingly familiar elements to this summer’s biggest hit. For one thing, the film hinges on the differing perceptions that parents and children have for a given toy. Then there’s the adult who forgets the joys of play. And the way in which one property can symbolize many things to many people. There’s also an insanely poppy soundtrack, and Will Ferrell as a corporate executive desperate to maintain the status quo. In other words, it’s The Lego Movie, but with dolls.
And that isn’t a bad thing. Rather, it feels like a fitting homage to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the filmmakers behind The Lego Movie and hits such as Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse and 21 Jump Street. As producers, directors, and writers, Lord and Miller have seemingly perfected the art of franchise deconstruction. In turn, their template has inspired other hit films, from Barbie to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. While it would be a stretch to say that Lord and Miller are saving Hollywood, it’s not much of a leap to see that they’re having an outsized impact on recent blockbusters. Here’s a look at four key elements Lord and Miller incorporate for crafting films that are unique, singularly funny, hugely popular, and clearly influential.
1. Love the thing you parody
What makes both Barbie and The Lego Movie work is that they’re not just about the toys they’re depicting—they’re about the filmmakers’ personal connection and response to those toys, and the way those relationships change over time. It’s a tricky thing to pull off, and it has to be done with genuine love—the Lego movie franchise sputtered when it spawned The Lego Ninjago Movie, which was based on a newer property that Lord and Miller didn’t have a lifelong connection with.
Lord and Miller’s narrative investigations can’t just be parody; they have to evince genuine love for the thing being parodied and deconstructed. That’s the difference between, say, their 21 Jump Street and the superficially similar Baywatch movie. Lord and Miller clearly think 21 Jump Street, the series, was a little silly, but they enjoy the silliness, whereas Seth Gordon and Dwayne Johnson appeared to think Baywatch was stupid, and they talked down to the material.
2. Respect the source material
In the Lord and Miller-produced Spider-Verse films, even the most ridiculous forms of Spider-Man get respect as equal parts of the canon. Spidey can simultaneously be a Looney Tunes-style pig, a Sam Spade-talking Nicolas Cage, an anime girl in a robot, a flabby middle-aged divorcee, an Afro-Latino high schooler, or a tyrannosaurus rex. Being silly while still maintaining an affection for the silliness, and taking those elements to their logical conclusions, requires a special kind of skill that Lord and Miller clearly have.
And it’s a skill that doesn’t work for everything. Live-action Star Wars canon, stung by fan reactions to the likes of Jar Jar Binks, isn’t ready for self-mockery and deconstruction. Lord and Miller, who were fired halfway through the Han Solo movie, were never going to be a great fit. The fact that the characters in Solo: A Star Wars Story seem a little more self-aware than usual is probably a holdover from when the two were in charge, though the film’s ’70s drag race vibe is very much Ron Howard channeling his pal George Lucas and American Graffiti.
3. No project is too ridiculous if done right
Lord and Miller’s first animated series, Clone High, which reimagined major historical figures as hormonal teenagers, didn’t make many waves at the time of its release. But it has since grown a cult following, leading to a modern reboot. From there came Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, the first of several Lord-Miller projects that didn’t sound like particularly good ideas for movies but worked anyway, because the duo’s genuine affection for the characters grounded the surrounding weirdness.
In a 2014 interview promoting 22 Jump Street, Miller declared, “Everything we’ve ever done has been riding on low expectations. Cloudy with A Chance Of Meatballs? What a terrible idea. Doing 21 Jump Street as a movie is a terrible idea. The Lego Movie sounds like a terrible idea. If people think this [sequel] is a good idea, we’re screwed.”
Come to think of it, a Barbie movie didn’t sound like a particularly good idea either, in theory. Yet the doll’s most obvious male counterpart in the marketplace, G.I. Joe, has had three live-action movies, none of which was made with the care and affection that Gerwig shows for Barbie.
Even when it comes to original projects, Lord and Miller’s approach to licensed fare can sneak in, like the Furby villains in The Mitchells Vs. The Machines, which earned the duo an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature. There’s always an awareness that franchise filmmaking can have a darker side too—witness Spider-Man 2099’s fundamental insistence on sticking to canon, or the plethora of ever-more-ridiculous fake Jump Street sequels advertised at the end of the second film. The balance the duo hit between affection, fear, and dissection can’t easily be duplicated by plugging in just any journeyman director—it’s the sort of approach that only a discerning fan of the material can bring.
4. Show the seams
CG animation is so slick in its natural state that it can feel cold and mechanical, even though it’s become a default that we’re used to. There’s no real equivalent there to seeing an animator’s thumbprint in the Plasticine of a Wallace And Gromit film. Lord and Miller’s solution? Add it. Their Lego Movie didn’t use slick CG models of the bricks, but instead relied on realistic simulations of the kind that had actually been played with. “Our intention was to do it exactly like a stop-motion film, so much so that you wouldn’t know what was CG and what was real,” Miller once told the Baltimore Sun, “down to having scratches and dust and thumbprints and dandruff. We had meetings about how much dandruff to put on the set ... ‘Some’ is the correct answer.”
The continuation of this idea is evident in the guide lines and ink jet bubbles left on the Spider-Verse artwork to make it look like a hand-drawn, printing-press inked comic, and in the new TMNT movie aesthetic, which director Jeff Rowe described as inspired by sketches he made on the margins of his school notebooks.
Maybe when it comes to long-in-limbo properties like He-Man or ThunderCats, or even arguably stalled franchises like Transformers, the answer is not to go big and bombastic like DC or Marvel, but to lean into an approach that favors films that are visibly homemade with love. When it comes down to it, the lesson of Lord and Miller, which is now being learned by others across the multiplex, is that being true to yourself, your passion, and your style might just connect with far more viewers than something that feels made by committee for easy consumption.