The Emoji Movie

The Emoji Movie takes place inside a smartphone, in a city called Textopolis where the emojis live and wait to be chosen by the phone's owner. Each of them is meant to express a single emotion, and each has a role to play in the messages that get sent. Gene is different: he can display many expressions at once, which makes him unable to do the one job the others take for granted. Hoping to be fixed, he sets out through the phone's various apps with his friend Hi-5 and the hacker Jailbreak, looking for a way to become a normal emoji. Their search gains urgency when a threat arises that could wipe out their entire world.

Tony Leondis directed the film, his fourth feature after Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch, Igor and Kung Fu Panda: Secrets of the Masters, from a screenplay he wrote with Mike White and Eric Siegel. T.J. Miller voices Gene, with James Corden as Hi-5, Anna Faris as Jailbreak, Maya Rudolph as Smiler, and Steven Wright and Jennifer Coolidge as Gene's parents. Produced by Michelle Raimo Kouyate for Sony Pictures Animation and Columbia Pictures, it runs 86 minutes.

The film cost about 50 million USD and took roughly 218 million USD worldwide, a strong return on its budget. Reception was far less favorable: critics gave it 2.9/10 across 132 reviews, while on IMDb it holds 3.5/10 from 79,000 votes and on TMDB 5.4/10 from 3,390 votes, audiences rating it somewhat higher than critics did.