Animated projects are raining from the rooftops today, as it looks like the “Lego” movies are going to be making a comeback of sorts, as it was just revealed that Universal Pictures is going to be behind a new live-action hybrid film with Keanu Reeves, of “John Wick” fame, in talks to star with “Toy Story 4” and “Transformers One” director Josh Cooley helming it.
We’ll just have to wait to learn what this secretive “Lego” film project is all about, as the only thing mentioned in the report from Deadline is that it will have a mix of animation and live-action, so your guesses will be as good as ours as to what they aim to achieve here and what the movie’s plot is going to be about. This news comes after the studio landed the rights back in 2020, and would be their first major effort at Universal since that deal was made. The last string of projects using the Lego band at Warner Bros. includes the two “The Lego Movie” installments, “The Lego Batman Movie,” and the mostly forgotten “The Lego Ninjago Movie.”
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Keanu Reeves isn’t new to the world of animation, being part of Pixar‘s “Toy Story” universe playing Duke Caboom in the 2019 effort (was directed by the aforementioned Cooley), voicing Shadow in the “Sonic the Hedgehog” films, led the Philip K. Dick (his fantastic sci-fi stories were used as the basis for “Blade Runner,” “Minority Report,” and “Total Recall“) feature adaptation a “A Scanner Darkly” from writer/director Richard Linklater (using a rotoscoping style of animation on top of real footage, that was made famous by legendary animation filmmaker Ralph Bakshi), is expected to be involved in a “John Wick” prequel animated film about his “impossible task” the got him out of the game, and worked on the Prime anthology video game series “Secret Level,” playing a gruff pilot of a giant military robot in their violent “Armored Core” segement.
Most recently, Reeves signed on to lend his voice to a feature-length version of an impressive stop-motion samurai action-packed short, “Hidari,” from director Masashi Kawamura (expanding from his own work), something we’re very excited to see come together.
Other things on the live-action front for the Canadian actor are films such as Tim Miller‘s sci-fi thriller “Shiver” at Warner Bros., has wrapped on Ruben Östlund’s (“Triangle of Sadness”) “The Entertainment System Is Down,” has Justin Lin (“Star Trek Beyond,” “Fast 9”) set to direct him in the Netflix adaptation of his immortal comic book “BRZRKR,” is also coming back for director Chad Stahelski‘s (“Highlander”) for “John Wick 5” (remains to be seen if he’ll show up in Donnie Yen‘s spinoff “Caine“), we don’t know if he’ll ultimately return to the Neo role for Drew Goddard‘s gestating “Matrix 5,” is expected to reunite with “Speed” co-star Sandra Bullock for romantic thriller a film at Amazon MGM Studios, and there had been some development on a sequel to “Constantine” at DC Studios.
Stay tuned for further information on the latest “Lego” movie as that rolls in. Until then, we’ll let our imaginations run wild with the potential of where this one could be going.
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
