LEGO Movie Greenlit and will be Released in 2014

Warner Bros. has greenlit their live-action / animated hybrid LEGO film adaptation, and they plan to release it in 2014. The studio is teaming up with working with the Australian-based animation company Animal Logic (Happy Feet, Legend of the Guardians) to develop the epic scale LEGO movie.

This LEGO movie has been in development since 2008, so it's nice to see that they finally kind of know where they want to go with it. The new movie will be an action-adventure set in a world made up of LEGOs. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs directing team Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were hired about a year ago to write and direct the film. They just completed the big screen adaptation of 21 Jump Street which looks promising. Robot Chicken director Chris McKay was also brought on to help co-direct the film under Lord and Miller. 

There are no story details for the film, but here are a few details revealed from a previous interview with the two directors.

We always sparked to the idea that you could make a super large scale brick film. Have you seen those brick films online? There's a zillion of them. People literally make them in their basements with little Lego mini-figs and they build elaborate sets and they range from being like the most low production value to some of them people have spent years on and they look beautiful and they're really intricately detailed.

And we kept thinking, gosh there's got to be a way to take… if somebody wants to make a Lego movie they should make one of those on an enormous scale where you could actually build enormous, beautiful Lego sets and put a camera  on the deck at mini-fig eye level and bring the kind of bravado that like the contemporary action-adventure film does, but do it on like this micro-scale. So we always sparked to that idea and it was just about trying to crack the character story to carry that.

I don't know we're exactly are going to execute it but I would say the vast majority of the film takes place in an immersive all-Lego environment. So it's going to star mini-figs and we've created these really cool characters and a really nice character story between these mini-figs. And it's going to take place in a universe that's made entirely out of Lego to the point where if there's water or clouds or like a big explosion, that will be made out of animated 

I'm curiously excited to see how this movie actually turns out. We all grew up with LEGOs, and they've become increasingly better and more popular over the years. We can only hope that they cracked the perfect story for these legendary bricks.

Casting for the live-action characters is expected to begin in January, and the studio has yet to set a specific release date, but they want to get it out in theaters sometime in 2014.