The Emoji Movie in 3D (2017)
Emojis are popular. Hollywood, discovering that something is popular and seeing the door “opened” by The LEGO Movie (without realizing the amount of talent and skill that went into that picture), has now jumped on the bandwagon, and next year we’ll be getting The Emoji Movie. In the film, T.J. Miller (Silicon Valley) voices Gene, an outsider emoji who’s abnormal because he can display more than one expression.
Gene “teams up with his handy best friend Hi-5 and the notorious code breaker Jailbreak on an epic adventure through the apps on a teenager’s phone,” and because this movie is all about branding, expect to see “cameos” from Candy Crush Saga, Dropbox, Instagram, Just Dance®, Spotify, Twitter, YouTube, Crackle, Facebook, Shazam, Snapchat, and Twitch. There’s the potential for this to be wry and clever, but there’s also the potential for it to go horribly wrong.
The Emoji Movie Trailer Literally Gets Promoted by Meh
The first trailer is less than encouraging. Rather than sell the plot or even the main character, this trailer introduces us to Mel Meh (Steven Wright), the “Meh” emoji who’s also Gene’s father (I really don’t want to know how emoji procreation works). Perhaps some people will find it cute, but I assume others will respond with the “baffled” emoji, or, in an old-fashioned twist, question mark punctuation.
Sony’s Emoji Movie Will Arrive in Summer 2017
Sony Pictures Animation has set an Aug. 11, 2017, release date for “The Emoji Movie,” making it the first title to land on the date. Sony won rights in July to the project, based on a pitch by Eric Siegel and Anthony Leondis about the round-headed figures that have become ubiquitous in social media. The duo are co-writing the script with Leondis directing. The logline is under wraps. Michelle Raimo Kouyate is producing. She stepped down in July after five years as production president of Sony Pictures Animation and signed a first-look deal.
The first trailer for The Emoji Movie is pretty
It’s a foregone conclusion that Sony Animation is making a feature-length, presumably quite expensive major studio film based on emojis, so we might as well embrace it. But even Sony doesn’t seem all that excited about the idea, as evidenced in the first teaser trailer for the film..
Rather than choose an exciting spokes-moji like praise hands or the eggplant everyone uses to represent a dong, the trailer is introduced by the “meh” emoji, voiced by professional “meh” person Steven Wright. Apparently, this apathetic symbol is also the father (through what mechanism of reproduction, we’re not sure) of TJ Miller’s Gene, a rogue-moji whose ability to express more than one emotion makes him a pariah amongst his peer-mojis.
