Every Lord and Miller Directed Movie, Ranked By Rotten Tomato Score

Published Sep 12, 2026, 7:53 AM EDT Ben Brewster is a filmmaker, critic, screenwriter, and actor whose work sits at the intersection of film culture, craft analysis, and storytelling. He is a movie list contributing writer at Collider and a contributing writer for High on Films, where he covers contemporary cinema, independent film, and festival releases with an eye toward narrative structure, performance, and visual language. Ben is an active film festival participant, having worked with Newport Film, the Nantucket Film Festival and as a screener for the Austin, Boston & Woodstock film festivals. He brings to that work a programming instinct shaped by years of close engagement with independent and documentary cinema. This comes with a deep investment in the kinds of films that rarely find their way into the mainstream conversation without someone willing to advocate for them. His background spans documentary and narrative filmmaking, film marketing, and production, including work with award-winning directors. This as well as developing his own indie production company, Lilac Creative Studio, through which he develops and produces original work across fiction and nonfiction forms. His debut documentary, Diamond in the Rust, is an examination of economic redevelopment and displacement in the Queens area of New York City. The film was recently accepted to the Unisphere Film Festival, the Defense of Democracy Film Festival, and the Urbanite Arts & Film Festival. This would mark his first festival recognition as a director. In addition to his writing and programming work, Ben hosts Beneath the Bloom, a film podcast exploring the work behind the scenes in cinema, and the struggles one can face to make a movie become a reality. The show reflects the same sensibility that runs through all of his work. A conviction that film is not merely entertainment but one of the most powerful tools human beings have for understanding each other. Across mediums, his work is driven by a deep belief in film as a communal, transformative art form. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. They've quietly built one of the most eccentrically successful filmography's and staggering track records in modern Hollywood. And with Project Hail Mary's recent arrival on Prime Video only reinforces just how rare that consistency actually is. Every single film they have directed together has landed in "certified fresh" territory, an almost unheard of streak across five features and nearly two decades of work. That consistency extends well beyond their directing credits too, since the duo also penned Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, as well as its sequel Across the Spider-Verse, two of the most critically and commercially adored animated films ever, with Beyond the Spider-Verse still to come. Few film-making partnerships can claim a resume this varied and this reliably strong across genre, format, and audience. Even so, greatness this constant rarely comes without at least one misstep, and Lord and Miller have one glaring exception on their record. The pair were famously fired from Solo: A Star Wars Story partway through production, with Ron Howard brought in to reshoot and finish the project after Lucasfilm grew uneasy with their more comedic, improvisational approach. It's a reminder that even filmmakers this talented can find themselves at odds with a studio unwilling to hand over full creative control. That rather public stumble makes their unbroken streak as credited directors even more impressive by comparison. Now, let's be clear. Rotten Tomatoes is far from a perfect measure of quality, reducing complex critical reactions down to a simple binary of positive or negative with no room for any nuance in between. A film can earn a 95% from critics who each rated it a lukewarm six out of ten, and another can sit at 60% while still containing some of the year's best film-making, buried under a handful of harsh outlier reviews. Still, when applied across an entire filmography rather than a single release, the Tomatometer is a pretty useful blunt instrument, often smoothing out individual critical biases into a rough consensus over time. Ranking Lord and Millers work this way reveals just how narrow the gap is between their best and their most decisive films, and just how rare that kind of consistency is. 5 '22 Jump Street' (2014) Image via Sony Pictures Releasing 22 Jump Street: 84% Critics, 77% Audience. 22 Jump Street had every reason to feel like a cash-grab sequel, arriving just two years after its predecessor and doubling down on a premise that seemingly had nowhere left to go. Instead, Lord and Miller leaned directly into that exact skepticism, building the entire film out of a meta joke about how sequels are usually worse than the original. Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill's chemistry only deepens on the second time around, and the movie's college setting gives the duo fresh material to mine without simply repeating the beats of the first installment. Critics largely agreed the joke worked, praising it as a rare sequel that actually improves on the original's whacky foundation. Even landing at the bottom of this particular ranking says more about the strength of Lord and Miller's overall body of work than any real weakness in the movie itself. An 84% critic score would be a career highlight for most comedy directors, and the film's slightly lower audience score reflects general sequel fatigue more than any true drop in quality. It is still one of the sharper most self-aware studio comedies of the 2010s, fully aware of its own absurdity and using that awareness as its greatest asset. Ranking last here is a testament to how high the bar sits across the rest of this list. 4 'Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs' (2009) Image via Sony Pictures Releasing Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs: 85% Critics, 72% Audience. Cloudy marked Lord and Miller's feature directorial debut in 2009, and has set the template for nearly everything that has followed in their careers. Their frenetic visual energy, the true emotional stakes buried underneath chaos, and a willingness to commit fully to an absurd premise. Adapting a picture book into a full animated feature about a town that is literally raining food could have easily played as a thin, gimmicky concept, something designed solely for children. But it diverges from that predicament, and finds its heart in its story about a scientist desperate for his father's approval. Bill Hader's lead performance grounds the movie's more erratic visual gags into something more sincere and relatable. Critics responded warmly to that balance, praising the film's visual imagination alongside its surprisingly earnest father-son core. The gap between the critic and audience scores is worth noting, suggesting the film's blend of manic humor and emotional sincerity did not land with every viewer the same way. However, that slight disconnect aside, the movie is a very impressive debut for the filmmaking duo, one that announced Lord and Miller as directors capable of developing substantive stories out of seemingly disposable premises or IPs. It also marked the beginning of their long-time collaboration with composer Mark Mothersbaugh, a partnership that would carry through several of their subsequent films. As a first outing, it set an unusually high bar for everything that came next. 3 '21 Jump Street' (2012) Image via Sony Pictures 21 Jump Street: 85% Critics, 83% Audience. Few reboots of dated source material have ever worked as smoothly as 21 Jump Street, transforming a mostly forgotten 1980s TV drama into one of the sharpest studio comedies of its decade. The decision by Lord and Miller to lean into total self-awareness, acknowledging directly that no one asked for this reboot, became the movie's greatest strength instead of a liability. Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum's pairing proved unexpectedly electric, with Tatum in particular revealing a gift for physical comedy few audiences had seen from him before. Critics were quick to praise the film's surprising intelligence, noting its satire of both '80s nostalgia and modern teen movie tropes ran deeper than its marketing suggested. Unlike Cloudy, this project's score aligned more evenly between the critics and the audience, suggesting the movie's comedic sensibility translated almost universally regardless of who was watching. That consistency helped cement Lord and Miller's reputation beyond animation, proving their specific brand of meta, self-aware comedy could carry a live-action studio franchise just as effectively. Of course, this movie also launched one of the more successful action-comedy franchises of the decade, and directly set up the sequel that would follow two years later. For another movie built on a premise this thin on paper, its lasting critical and commercial success stands just as true fourteen years later. 2 'Project Hail Mary' (2026) Image via Amazon MGM Project Hail Mary: 94% Critics, 95% Audience. Project Hail Mary marked Lord and Miller's long-awaited return to directing after more than a decade away from the chair, and the wait clearly paid off. Adapting Andy Weir's hard science fiction novel, the film follows Ryan Gosling as a high school science teacher turned astronaut with amnesia piecing together humanity's last hope for survival aboard an abandoned spacecraft. Critics praised Gosling's performance as one of his finest, balancing true witty commentary with physical comedy against the story's more emotionally weighty stakes. The film became Amazon MGM's biggest theatrical opening ever, proving Lord and Miller's instincts translate just as powerfully to blockbuster science fiction as they do to straightforward animation or action comedy. Its recent arrival on Prime Video has only extended the film's cultural footprint, introducing it to audiences who might have missed its theatrical run this past Spring. The gap between projects makes this achievement even more remarkable, over a decade removed from their last directing credit, and still landing among the best reviewed films of their whole career. It stands as clear proof that Lord and Miller's niche sensibility, finding high-level emotional stakes inside high-concept premises, only sharpened with time away from the director's chair. Few filmmakers manage a comeback this strong after this long a hiatus. 1 'The Lego Movie' (2014) Image via Warner Bros. The Lego Movie: 96% Critics, 87% Audience. The Lego Movie sits at the top of Lord and Miller's filmography for good reason, remaining not just their best reviewed film but one of the most acclaimed animated features of the past two decades. This could easily have played as another feature-length toy commercial, but instead it was treated by its directors with a care and inventive precision of creativity, conformity, and childhood imagination usually found in high-class live action projects. The movie's rapid-fire visual gags never come at the expense of its surprisingly moving final act, a structural trick Lord and Miller would return to throughout their careers. Critics were nearly unanimous in their praise, citing both its technical animation achievements and marveling at its unexpectedly thoughtful emotional core. It endures as the clearest distillation of everything that makes Lord and Miller's filmography so varied and distinct, a visual cahos that seems to find its anchor through true sincerity, a genre subversion used in service of feeling instead of an attempt at a set of ironic quibs. This movie's success also directly opened the door for their opportunity to pen the animated Spider-Verse years later, showing how studios felt this project was proof of their specific creative instincts with major franchise material. Landing at 96% critic approval, it is the clear water high mark of their careers so far, (save the Project Hail Mary debate for another day), and has been the project that critics have measured every subsequent film of theirs against. Still, everything that they built afterward, in comedy, animation, and now science fiction, traces directly back to what worked so completely here. Release Date February 7, 2014 Runtime 100 Minutes Director Phil Lord, Chris Miller Writers Dan Hageman, Kevin Hageman, Phil Lord, Chris Miller Sequel(s) The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, The Lego Batman Movie, The Lego Ninjago Movie Franchise(s) LEGO