Treasury secretary nominee builds on Legos

Three years before President Donald Trump’s pick for treasury secretary began amassing an astonishing swath of Hollywood credits, he was just breaking into executive producing by backing a bunch of colorful kiddie toys.

That’s right. Steve Mnuchin first built his IMDb.com dossier out of Legos.

When “The Lego Batman Movie” opened Friday, Mnuchin’s name will be prominently featured in the closing credits. And Trump’s Cabinet nominee — he awaits confirmation vote after Democrats last month boycotted a Senate hearing — should also receive an executive producer credit in September, when Warner Bros.’ “Lego Ninjago Movie” opens.

The tagline on that latter film is: “Find your inner piece.” And the first piece of Munchin’s exec-producing portfolio landed on Feb. 7, 2014, when “The Lego Movie” opened to blockbuster a $70 million domestic debut. The Oscar-nominated PG film involving toy “master builders” would go on to gross nearly a half-billion dollars worldwide.

From there, Mnuchin became something of a master builder himself. One week after the animated “Lego Movie” opened, his live-action “Winter’s Tale” was released, followed that year by hits such as the Tom Cruise-starring “Edge of Tomorrow” ($370 million worldwide), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-nominated “Inherent Vice” and Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winning “American Sniper.”

Since then, Mnuchin has had big hits (“Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Sully”) and misses (“Pan,” “In the Heart of the Sea”), including two films that suited up a superheroic Ben Affleck: last year’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” and “Suicide Squad.”

Eight years before “The Lego Movie,” the 54-year-old former Goldman Sachs banker and hedge-fund manager created Dune Entertainment, which helped finance such blockbusters as “Avatar” and the X-Men franchise. Then in 2013, it merged to form RatPac-Dune Entertainment, which, in its partnership with Warner Bros., to bring Wonder Woman and the Flash to the screen.

Mnuchin — who became Trump’s campaign finance chairman in spring — has also been bedeviled by his brief, controversial teaming with the still-struggling Relativity Media; just this month, he was named in a fraud lawsuit brought against Relativity by RKA film financing.

But now, if he becomes treasury secretary, will he leave Hollywood entirely? Last month, it was widely reported that Mnuchin plans to divest his interest in more than 80 Warner Bros. films, which would include not only billion-dollar superheroes like Batman, but also all those Lego bucks.