I love the original Lego Movie, and it’s frustratingly hard for me to explain why, but I can’t imagine the sequel working with the original.

It’s not just me being cynical and saying “it’s a sequel, so it will be bad.” It could be the funniest movie in the universe, I could enjoy every second of it, and I still feel like it wouldn’t sit right with me. Because the beauty of the Lego Movie is that it took a franchise that’s so enormous and has the potential to tell a story about basically anything and managed to produce a single, meaningful narrative while remaining recognizable as a Lego-inspired movie. “Legos” is such a weird and broad topic to span and yet it did it almost flawlessly; comparatively, the Lego Batman movie wasn’t really a Lego movie, it was a Batman movie.

So when you make a sequel to a movie that’s beauty is in its surprisingly narrow focus, it brings up the question, “where will it end?” How can you make a sequel to a movie that is meant to teach a lesson about how imagination is limitless without simultaneously contradicting that lesson by telling a new story about the exact same characters in a terrible situation? Suddenly this isn’t about the Lego Movie anymore, it’s about marketing, which is what everyone was so afraid would happen with the first movie.

The Lego Movie is such a good movie that it’s actually made it impossible to write a sequel to it without undermining the original; it gives us a simple lesson that can’t really be expanded upon, so the only purpose that a sequel could possibly serve is to throw in more jokes. Which is probably what it will do. It’ll be funny, yeah, but it won’t be the same, and fans of the original will probably leave the theater with an uneasy feeling in their stomach.