| A LEGO Brickumentary | |
| Narrator: | Jason Bateman |
| Music: | John Jennings Boyd |
| Distributor: | RADiUS-TWC |
| Runtime: | 93 minutes[1] |
| Language: | English |
| Budget: | $1 million |
| Gross: | $101,531[2] |
A Lego Brickumentary (also known as Beyond the Brick: A Lego Brickumentary) is a 2014 Danish-American documentary film directed by Kief Davidson and Daniel Junge, focused on the Danish construction toy Lego. The film was released on July 31, 2015. The film received mixed reviews from critics, who praised its appeal but criticized the promotional tone of the film. It grossed over $100,000 against a production budget of $1 million, although it fared better in home media sales.[3]
A LEGO Brickumentary offers a look at the global appeal of the LEGO building-block toy.
The film had its premiere at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival on April 20, and was released in theaters on July 31, 2015.[4]
The film grossed $101,531 in theaters against a production budget of $1 million, in addition to $427,757 in domestic DVD sales.
The film received mixed reviews from critics. Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports a 55% rating based on 49 reviews, with an average score of 5.41/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "A LEGO Brickumentary offers a cheerful overview of the popular toy that should satisfy diehard enthusiasts, but its aggressively promotional tone may turn off LEGO agnostics."[5] On Metacritic, the film has a 51 out of 100 rating based on 19 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[6]
Peter Sobczynski of RogerEbert.com gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of five.[7] Peter Debruge of Variety writes that the film feels like a "glorified DVD extra" for The Lego Movie.[1] Spectrum Culture wrote that "Brickumentary is both interesting and informative as well as being fun. There may be no “other side” to this documentary, but it does, indeed, give great depth to the toy, its inception and evolution. It also manages, quite successfully, to never, ever be boring."[8] Jordan Hoffman of the New York Daily News gave the film one out of five stars, noting "As a movie, it can be as annoying as stepping on a stray LEGO brick with your socks off."[9]