'The Emoji Movie' Is a Thing That's Being Made, and I Think I Just Threw Up a Little

Sony Pictures Animation released a new teaser trailer for The Emoji Movie today, and typing that out makes me hate myself a little more than usual.

Look, I get it.  Children are stupid.  It's not their fault, they're born that way.  It takes years and years for their youthful fog to finally lift, if ever.  So, I would never blame a child for liking the idea of a movie centered around the stupid little pictograms on their smartphones.  Their magical little brains see the world unsullied by the bounds of maturity.  The real evil here, the cynical bottom-feeding dumpster-diving creatively impotent movie execs and writers who would adapt toilet paper into a movie if they thought enough tweens were interested, deserve the kind of treatment we usually afford gum on the bottom of our shoes.

I blame Lego.  If the Danish toy company hadn't managed to make a sweet and fun hit movie out of their inanimate building blocks, this dreck probably wouldn't be getting made.  But now, any tiny piece of nonsense that has even the slightest bit of brand recognition can and will be slapped into the cinemas to squeeze every last nickel and dime out of the pockets of honest hard-working parents everywhere...and I guess also from the shitty parents, but who cares about them and their bratty kids?

What's worse is that this flick probably won't be epically terrible on the scale of movies like The Room or Trolls 2.  It will just be the exact sort of aggressively mediocre lowest-common-denominator garbage that's been normalized by our consumerist culture.  It will come, make a few bucks, and go, and in ten years we'll all be remembering its release on MTV's nostalgic look back at this decade.  We'll laugh, and look at each other, and say, "Ah, remember the days when Sony Pictures Animation collectively thought we were all idiots?  Good times."

Until then, we have the teaser trailer starring the emojis for "meh" and "poo."  How appropriate.