Because Sony didn't want other animation studios to create their take on emojis ahead of them, the film was produced in just two years, which is a rather short amount of time as far as animated films from major studios go.
David Feiss (Cow and Chicken) worked on the film as a storyboard artist. At his request, he was not named in the credits.
The film slowly became this for Sony Pictures Animation since late 2018, as press releases from the studio made little mention of The Emoji Movie in their resume, and no posts regarding the film have been made on their social media accounts after August of that year. Furthermore, when Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse were both released to much better reviews and box office receiptsnote Peter Rabbit and Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween both having been only released under the company's name; SPA was otherwise uninvolved with either film (the latter of which was released to universal acclaim, including an Oscar win), SPA decided to make sequels out of those films instead.
Creator Killer: Tony Leondis' career was irreparably damaged by the movie's universal thrashing, with no other planned projects in the pipeline since its release. A film he had been planning at DreamWorks Animation, B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Operations, remains indefinitely shelved (though DWA's sale to NBCUniversal and eventual regime change didn't help matters, either).
Many saw similarities to this film and The LEGO Movie, which some argue is the reason the movie was conceived in the first place. However, others argue that it has more in common with Inside Out or Wreck-It Ralph.
According to director Tony Leondis, the film took inspiration from Toy Story, claiming that he wanted to create a movie based on Toy Story's concept with something that hasn't been done yet (in this case, emojis).
International Coproduction: Not the movie itself, but the Latin American Spanish dub, albeit with a very odd twist: Besides including Mexican voice actors (including "startalents", the name in Mexican voice acting for Celebrity Voice Actors), the dub also features celebrity voice actors from Argentina, Dominican Republic, Panama, and Guatemala, countries that (with the sole exception of Argentina) have no voice acting industry to speak of.
An embargo was placed on any sort of reviews for the movie until release day. It's widely speculated that this was because of... pretty much everything about the movie garnering an almost unanimously-negative reception from the get-go. Sure enough, upon release the film got a 6% Tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes,note and initially, it was a 0% and an average rating of 2.9/10.
"Critics Consensus: 🚫"
It was later revealed that they had done so to prevent Rotten Tomatoes from ruining their chances to make a profit, which didn't work out very well as the film was only barely profitable.
For bonus points, Sony denied critics test screenings of the movie, just to be sure no bad reviews were staving off profits on the opening weekend. Unfortunately for them, many theaters saw this as the writing on the wall and released the film early anyway to try and recoup some of the money before the bad reviews caught up. The result was that critics got to watch and review the movie early anyway.
A rare example of this occurring before the film even came out. A click-bait post on Tumblr (whose "source" leads to this video) announced that the movie was canceled due to negative feedback from the trailer. However, people legitimately actually thought the post was being serious and many were glad that the movie was canceled, despite there being no official sources to back this claim up. It's extremely rare for this to happen (even those who fall under this are canceled due to controversy rather than bad reception).
Shortly after the film's release, word spread that Sony announced they would be making a new "X movie" about memes. Which comes from a parodic image edit.
Release Date Change: Originally set for release on August 4, it was moved up to July 28. The UK gets it on the former date.
Rule 34: In a somewhat ironic sense, the film has spawned tons of rule 34, particularly of Addie and Jailbreak. Most infamous of these ironic artists is Shadman, who has dedicated many pieces dedicated to lewding the two ladies.
Inadvertent and a rare self-inflicted example with Jordan Peele. He was so insulted when Sony offered him the role of Poop that it inspired him to briefly retire from acting and focus on film directing.
Played straight with T.J. Miller, being his lowest rated movie. Not helping matters was that he was later accused of sexually assaulting a woman, which was revealed a few months after the film's release. Miller hadthreeother movies that were still in production at the time his sexual harassment allegations were revealed, but he hasn't had any major roles since then.
Stillborn Franchise: Judging by the statement from Mel in the teaser: "It's my pleasure to announce our first movie.", this movie was intended to be the start of a franchise. However, its overwhelmingly negative reception means that any sequels will be very unlikely to happen.
While things generally went smoothly during production, it was extremely rushed, being produced in just two years to stop other animation studios from making their movies featuring emojis. On top of that, Sony only greenlit the movie out of desperation: the studio was still struggling from the fallout of the 2014 hack, and since they had brokered a deal to share the film rights to Spider-Man, their most lucrative asset, with Marvel Studios that year, the studio was desperate to produce anything that could potentially attract audiences.
T.J. Miller, who voiced Gene, was reluctant to join the production, and only did so when director Tony Leondis revealed the plot outline to him.
The DVD commentary mentions that Smiler's robots were originally stopsigns, which was changed because stopsigns aren't scary.
Word of God: The DVD commentary addresses several events not spelled out in the film itself, such as Jailbreak being half-princess and half-hacker at the end and the Dropbox plug being a narrative device to explain why the robots couldn't access it.
Working Title: The film's original title was "Emojimovie: Express Yourself".
Michael Lynton, an executive at Sony, left the company before the film was released to focus all of his efforts at working for Snap Inc., the owner of Snapchat (which he was already involved with before becoming chairman). Since Snapchat is one of the apps featured in the film, the use of Product Placement was likely very deliberate in this case.
The film became the first animated feature to be nominated for the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay, Worst Screen Combo (any two obnoxious emojis) and Worst Director, and the first to be nominated for a Razzie in general since the Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie ("Worst Prequel, Remake, Rip-off or Sequel"), winning all four awards. Interestingly, none of the voice actors received any Razzie nominations.
It is also the second animated movie to win a Razzie ever, period, the first being Thumbelina (in the "Worst Song" category for "Marry the Mole").
Patrick Stewart was ecstatic to be asked to play Poop since he never gets asked to do weird shit. They would have asked him around when he was coming off of filming the notoriously depressing Logan.
