Exploring the limits of Lego: Can you have too much?

Come on, Ron, here. We can do this. That's from LEGO Marvel Avengers Code Red on Disney+. And while the show is good, you are unlikely to be all that impressed by it. That's because despite being clever and well executed, it's not all that different from other LEGO video offerings. Considering oversaturation destroyed the market for theatrical LEGO films and has been a source of criticism in the video game sphere, you'd think the company would be more careful about overextending itself in the streaming area as well. But that seems to be a lesson they just refuse to learn. What happened with LEGOs? They used to be simple. Harry Potter LEGOs, Star Wars LEGOs. I mean, I'm not saying it's bad. I just want to know what happened. In 2014, LEGO teamed up with Warner Brothers to release The LEGO Movie. Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the film was packed with celebrities playing licensed characters from world-famous franchises like DC Comics, The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and Star Wars. Chewie! We're supposed to be halfway to Naboo for a sweet party right now. This hyperdrive keeps malfunctioning, taking us to loser systems like this. Even though it was widely expected to be a soulless toy commercial masquerading as a movie, it wound up being hailed as original. It scored big with critics and was a massive box office hit. If anybody has black parts, I need them, okay? I only work in black, and sometimes very, very dark gray. Given how big the movie blew up, sequels were inevitable, And The Lego Movie was quickly followed up in 2017 by the well-liked but slightly less financially and critically successful spinoff, The Lego Batman Movie. Later that same year, that film was then itself followed up with the critically panned box office disappointment, The Lego Ninjago Movie. By the time the direct sequel, The Lego Movie 2, the second part, finally arrived in theaters in 2019, audiences had seemingly grown bored with the franchise. After just three movies, it had already come to feel too formulaic. And while the movie didn't flop, its drastically reduced box office performance convinced Warner Brothers to allow its rights to the franchise to expire. That's great. You can't do anything better. There's no reason why you should move. You, Paul, you just moved and you just wrecked it. Uh-huh. You wrecked it! Lego, as a brand, was criticized for hurting its long-term viability as a film property by oversaturating the market with too many features too quickly. But it wasn't the first time the company had faced such criticism. In fact, if you know the history of the company, then you know that oversaturating markets and overextending their brand seems to be something of a tradition at LEGO. Although they didn't invent the idea of interlocking plastic toy building blocks, LEGO started making them as early as 1949. After experiencing success with the toy, the company's name became virtually synonymous with its product, and it dominated its market for decades. In 1978, however, several key LEGO patents expired. And over the subsequent years, the company found itself facing drastically increased competition, as well as frequent legal battles to defend its intellectual property. At the time, children's tastes in entertainment were changing. Video games were quickly becoming much more popular, and the market for physical toys was shrinking. LEGO, as a brand, would have to evolve if it was going to stay afloat. We were making the wrong products, and we were not even able to deliver the products that people wanted to the stores. To that end, they tried making a brief foray into original entertainment with the 1987 television series Edward and Friends. Then, in 1995, they began licensing LEGO video game content with the Japan-only release of Sega's LEGO Fun to Build. LEGO even made efforts to expand into the children's clothing business, as well as the theme park business with LEGOLAND. But despite all of their attempted corporate innovations, their business position remained precarious. After a few years, it all took its toll, and by 1998, LEGO found itself facing its first significant financial shortfall in decades. The news was accompanied by a layoff of roughly 10% of its entire workforce, and the future looked bleak. So in 1999, largely out of financial desperation, LEGO did something it had never done before. It announced it would be releasing LEGO play sets based on licensed, pre-existing brands. The first licensed LEGOs were Star Wars themed, and they were released at the same time as the Winnie the Pooh themed set of Duplos. Products like those are commonplace now, but at the time, the move was controversial among hardcore LEGO fans. who feared LEGO's original settings would be lost. What I see are people inspired by each other, people taking what you made and making something new out of it. Parents groups were also unhappy, complaining that the licensed sets, which were generally only good for building predetermined vehicles or settings, were really the antithesis of LEGO's traditional build whatever your imagination wants philosophy. Enduring the bad press may have been worthwhile if the toy manufacturer could have made the sets pay off financially. But due to the additional licensing costs for their respective intellectual properties, they couldn't really do it. The company was criticized in business circles for overextending its brand in its attempts to stay relevant. After a change in management and some tweaks to the business model, however, LEGO figured out how to make the licensed sets profitable. And once they had that down, they never looked back. Intellectual property-inspired sets proliferated quickly. And in the subsequent years, recognizable IPs like Harry Potter, Mickey Mouse, Batman, Spider-Man, Jurassic Park, and Indiana Jones all turned up at toy stores in LEGO form. Since selling toys was the company's main priority, the focus on IP-related products would echo throughout LEGO's other efforts. I'm a night-stalking, crime-fighting vigilante. I don't feel anything emotionally except for rage. And over on the video game side of things, the story was much of the same. The first licensed LEGO video game was 2001's LEGO Creator Harry Potter for Microsoft Windows. This would be followed by more Harry Potter, as well as Lego games set in the universes of Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Batman, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Similarly, in recent years, anyone with a subscription to Disney Plus or Max could tell you that Lego's television and home video department has been kicking out content in overdrive. At the same time, Lego has continued to produce television shows based on its own Ninjago, Bionicle, and Lego City properties. There has also been a recent Unikitty spinoff series based on the character from the Lego movie, a season-long show called LEGO Jurassic World, Legend of Isla Nublar, among others. There's a real possibility that the overwhelming volume of LEGO offerings in the medium is ultimately damaging the audience's ability to ever get really excited about any particular piece of content. I think I got it, but just in case, tell me the whole thing again I wasn't listening. For those who truly want to know, there may be a pretty good test coming up in the next few years. That's because after Warner Brothers released the rights to their theatrical films based on LEGO properties, they were snatched up by Universal. And in 2023, it was widely reported that the studio had finally started development on a new LEGO movie. While there's no release date set as of this writing, it will certainly be interesting to see whether there's still an appetite for a new LEGO movie after the tsunami of LEGO home video content. You've always been a good boy. Now come along. Time to kick some butt, North Pole style. But if LEGO as a company wasn't so prone to flooding the market with products and overextending its brand, would we even have to wait and see? It's impossible not to wonder if LEGO had employed a more solid, long-term strategy for its theatrical releases, would they have a more solid film brand today? And could the same be true about LEGO's gaming brand, or even their core toy brand? And of course, selling those toys is what it's really all about. LEGO is consistently releasing new licensed play sets, and the need to promote them might, at the end of the day, simply be more important to the company than any other consideration. That doesn't really bode well for a generation of consumers that have come to have a genuine fondness for the sweet, goofy vibe of the LEGO versions of their favorite entertainment franchises. But there is at least some hope. After all, one of the defining qualities of LEGO bricks is that if you screw something up, you can always just learn from your mistakes, take them apart, and rebuild.