All 5 Movies Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Ranked

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Published Mar 22, 2026, 10:09 AM EDT

Jeremy has more than 2300 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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There are a fair few filmmaking duos where both people share a surname, on account of being siblings (see the Coens and the Safdies, though both pairs of brothers have gone their separate ways in more recent years), and then there’s also one noteworthy duo who share first names: the Daniels (Kwan and Scheinert). Further, you’ve also got Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and they don’t share any names, but they are just about always linked. Their first big project was an animated TV series called Clone High, but since then, they’ve become better known for their movies, a couple of them animated, a couple more live-action R-rated comedies, and now a new one (at the time of writing) that’s a large-scale sci-fi film, almost even an epic.

Lord and Miller are also well-tied to the Spider-Verse films, with both producing Into the Spider-Verse (and Lord getting a screenplay credit), and then both were credited with serving as producers and writers for its sequel, Across the Spider-Verse. There was also Solo: A Star Wars Story, which is probably worth mentioning. They were the original directors of that, but got replaced while it was still being filmed, leaving the project due to creative differences. That’s probably a factor in the duo not having a directorial release between 2015 and 2025, but they had been active as producers and writers throughout (for those aforementioned Spider-Verse movies and some other things). What’s focused on below are those movies Lord and Miller specifically directed, and they are hard to rank, given that there’s nothing bad here so far. Consider it less of a “worst to best” kind of ranking, and more of a “good to great” sort of thing.

5 'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' (2009)

There’s probably the least to say about Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, of all the movies here, beyond mentioning that it was the first feature film Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directed, and that it was, in hindsight, something of a warm-up for greater things to come. Again, that’s not a suggestion it’s bad, because for a family-friendly comedy, it’s pretty good. There are certainly plenty of movies that are kid-friendly and would prove hard to get through, if you're not a kid, so a movie mostly aimed at kids being even decently entertaining for older viewers is worth celebrating (kids are unlikely to get the joke involving the presidents on Mount Rushmore, specifically what happens to the head of Abraham Lincoln).

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs throws a lot of jokes at you, never really taking things very seriously, and it makes for a decent enough watch.

The film is, overall, a pretty relentlessly paced sci-fi comedy about a man making a machine that causes clouds to rain food instead of rain, which is great for the small town he lives in, at first, but things naturally spiral out of control, turning Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs into something of a particularly silly disaster movie, or maybe a disaster movie parody. The animation hasn’t held up fantastically, and maybe it looked a little off in 2009, too (at least compared to what Pixar was putting out in the late 2000s and early 2010s; it’s not borderline-timeless like Up or Toy Story 3), but then some parts of it are creative on a visual front. It throws a lot of jokes at you, never really taking things very seriously, and it makes for a decent enough watch. To go with the food thing, it feels a bit like takeaway, or even junk/fast food, but sometimes, that hits the spot and proves enough, so such a comparison isn't the most damning thing in the world.

4 '21 Jump Street' (2012)

So, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was a loose adaptation of the children’s book of the same name, with Lord and Miller’s subsequent project, 21 Jump Street, also being kind of based (albeit loosely) on an older property. 21 Jump Street, originally, was a crime/drama TV series that ran for five seasons between 1987 and 1991, with the premise being perhaps high-concept, seeing as it was about undercover police officers passing as youths and going undercover to tackle crime mostly perpetrated by teenagers, but taking the whole thing seriously, for the most part. As for 2012’s 21 Jump Street, it’s very much not that, beyond having the same premise and featuring some cameo appearances from actors who were in the original TV series.

Instead of being a drama, 21 Jump Street (2012) is a broad comedy, having a larger focus on action than the original series did, too. Lord and Miller weren’t credited with writing this one, but it does have the same kind of fast-paced and sometimes absurd humor you find in their other projects… just a lot cruder than what you'll get in, say, the aforementioned Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. 21 Jump Street certainly earns its R-rating, and look, if you put Jonah Hill in a movie where he can’t swear a lot, are you really making the most of your Jonah Hill? He’s very good here, and makes for one half of a great duo with Channing Tatum, who got to really flex his (at the time) surprising comedic chops here. It’s a buddy cop comedy, so if you get the main duo working this well, then you're more than halfway there, really, to making a pretty solid comedy.

3 '22 Jump Street' (2014)

Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill as Jenko and Schmidt undercover in 22 Jump Street.

Most of what can be said about 21 Jump Street can also be said about 22 Jump Street, which is very self-aware as a sequel, to the point where that’s pretty much the whole joke. Things get a good deal more meta, and if 21 Jump Street was something of a parody of the original show, or buddy cop movies generally, then 22 Jump Street is like a feature-length parody of sequels as a whole. If you can get behind that, then there’s a good chance you'll find it even funnier than the first one.

It should be stressed, though, that both movies are neck-and-neck quality-wise, and the consistency here does have to be admired. It might be the stuff shown during the end credits of 22 Jump Street that pushes it over the line when it comes to quality, or makes the film as a whole even funnier than 21 Jump Street. Picking out the “best end credits in cinema history” would be a strange and difficult thing to do, but those featured in 22 Jump Street would have to make the film a contender.

2 'Project Hail Mary' (2026)

Easily the newest film of Lord and Miller’s at the time of writing, being their first film directed in 12 years, Project Hail Mary is also the first movie they’ve helmed that’s not directly a comedy. There’s still quite a bit of humor to be found in Project Hail Mary, yet it’s balanced with a very high-stakes story that involves a desperate mission into outer space, all for the purpose of finding out why the sun seems to be dimming. There’s a lot more to it than that, and plenty of things that can be spoiled (and were given away in the trailers), but that’s the basics. Earth needs to be saved, and Ryan Gosling’s character is on a spaceship and has to deal with uncertainties both about his past and for his future.

Structurally, Project Hail Mary is ambitious, even if the non-chronological storytelling isn't executed perfectly. Still, that’s a fairly minor flaw in the overall scheme of things, and anything else you might want to critique here would probably amount to not much more than a nitpick in nature. This is an expansive, exciting, and moving sci-fi film that really does succeed at hitting all the beats it wants to, as an emotional roller-coaster of sorts. You're bumped away from feeling tense to funny to sad and then back again, all before feeling other things, and it keeps that momentum up, for the most part, for a fairly long runtime. Ryan Gosling is also very good here. Not that he needs to prove himself at this point, and nor is him being good here very surprising, but he really has to – and does – carry so much of this movie, oftentimes as the only person on-screen.

1 'The Lego Movie' (2014)

The Lego Movie is a mostly animated film, with some live-action footage incorporated in an ultimately interesting (and kind of surprising) way. It’s also so much better than pretty much everyone back in 2014 could’ve expected it to be, being about as much of a pleasant (and genuine) surprise as Guardians of the Galaxy, which also came out that year (Chris Pratt can be found at the center of both, even more surprisingly). And then, while we’re still going on about surprises, The Lego Movie hit theaters only a few months before 22 Jump Street, so that Lord and Miller were able to deliver with both movies – and have them presumably made close together – is extra impressive.

Maybe The Lego Movie is a feature-length ad, but it’s a good feature-length ad, if that is the case. It throws in a whole bunch of different tropes and storytelling beats, keeping you on edge about what will be subverted and what might be played sort of straight, and then the sense of remixing continues because having Lego figures as the characters allows for a good many crossovers and unlikely team-ups. It’s a relentlessly fast-paced movie, and a genuinely clever – not to mention consistently funny – one. Of the movies Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have directed to date, it’s probably the best.

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