Jason Segel, Drew Pearce team for “Lego Movie” hit comedy spin-off

PanARMENIAN.Net - Warner Bros.’ Lego empire keeps expanding. The studio has hired Jason Segel, the actor who helped Disney revive The Muppets several years ago, and Drew Pearce, the writer behind Iron Man 3, to pen and co-direct a new Lego movie, this one titled The Billion Brick Race, The Hollywood Reporter reveals.

Thanks to the success of last year's The Lego Movie ($469 million worldwide), Warners will be cranking out the sequels and spinoffs over the coming years. Billion Brick would be in addition to three movies that the studio already has dated for release or is in production on: the Charlie Bean-directed Ninjago in 2016, followed by The Lego Batman Movie in 2017 and The Lego Movie 2 in 2018.

The Lego Movie brain trust of Phil Lord, Chris Miller, Dan Lin and Roy Lee are on board to produce Billion Brick Race, whose plot details are being kept hidden deep in Bricksburg. The story will be based on an original idea by Pearce that excited the studio.

Brick Race has no release date and is in the early stages of development. Courtenay Valenti is overseeing for the studio.

This would be Segel and Pearce’s first foray into feature directing. Segel has already been branching out into writing studio films, all in the comedy realm, including Forgetting Sarah Marshall and last year’s Sex Tape.

Pearce, on the other hand, is an action franchise player and worked on Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, which opens July 31. He is also working on a Ghostbusters movie for Sony.