Katie Brown | Contributing Writer
This past weekend “The Lego Movie” raked in $69.11 million in the American box office, making it the highest grossing film of the year.
The film’s success also makes it the second highest grossing film ever for a film released in February. The first was Mel Gibson’s 2004 movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” with more than $83 million.
It also topped the opening weekend of Disney’s “Frozen,” which earned $67.4 million over the three-day thanksgiving weekend.
Currently the film has a 95 percent critic rating and a 93 percent audience rating on the movie review website, Rotten Tomatoes.
One critic on the website, Chicago Sun-Times’s Bill Zwecker, said “the visuals are spectacular, the 3D technology is artfully used and the story is jam-packed with so many funny lines, it’s hard to catch all the jokes that are delivered in rapid-fire succession—constantly tweaking many popular culture icons.”
Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers said, “the brightly-imagined ‘Lego Movie’ is a wickedly smart and funny free-for-all, and sassy enough to shoot well-aimed darts at corporate branding.”
The cast includes Will Arnett, Chris Pratt, Elizabeth Banks, Liam Neeson, and Will Ferrell. The storyline centers on a construction worker, Master Builder, who is tasked with saving the Lego world from an villain who wants to permanently glue it together.
A few days before the film’s release Warner Bros. announced that there will be a sequel to the high-grossing film, which will be written by writer of “The Internship” and “Mr. Popper’s Penguins” Jared Stern and writer of “Girl Most Likely” Michelle Morgan.
One of the film’s directors and writers Phil Lord said in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, “If you focus on the story, and the emotional story of the character, then you can get away with everything that you want. As long as you nail that through-line, the rest of the world can be insane.”