Not a day goes by without Twitter, Instagram and other social feeds taking time to celebrate some form of holiday – no matter how obscure. Over the weekend, World Emoji Day had its turn in the limelight, and Sony took the opportunity to announce Deadpool star T.J. Miller will headline The Emoji Movie (you can check out his cheeky audition tape above).
News arrives in tandem with an official title for the feature film, which will hit theaters in 2017 bearing the name EmojiMovie: Express Yourself.
Miller, meanwhile, has clinched the role of Gene, a ‘meh’ emoji who is designed to display but one emotion much like his parents. An unexpected glitch in his system flips the table, though, opening up a host of expressions for Miller’s cutesy protagonist to experience.
Here’s the all-too-brief logline for Sony’s flick: “Inside your phone, there’s a secret world – and we enter through the text app where we discover Emoji Valley, where the industrious Emoji live and work.”
Beyond Emoji Valley, T.J. Miller had booked roles in Michael Bay’s blockbuster sequel Transformers: The Last Knight, along with the long-gestating adaptation of Ready Player One. 20th Century Fox is surely cooking up a Deadpool 2 as well, where Miller will reprise his part as Wade Wilson’s longtime friend, Weasel.
Swapping Silicon Valley for the secretive world of Emoji Valley, T.J. Miller will headline Sony’s EmojiMovie: Express Yourself – with plenty more casting tidbits to come in the coming weeks – when it hits these shores on August 11, 2017.