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It was once a toy company. It was headed for bankruptcy, but now Lego is definitely on a roll.

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The Lego Movie earlier this year that was a huge success and helped awaken the child in many of us.

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Now, Jake Tapper has more on why Lego is no brick off the old block.

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Lego is seemingly everywhere.

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Is it just me or does something seem weird today?

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The Simpsons went full-on Lego for their 550th episode,

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melding their animation with a full 3-D generated Lego Springfield.

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Lady Gaga tapped a Lego artist to turn her torso into yellow bricks for her latest music video.

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There's even a Lego documentary that premiered a few days ago at the Tribeca Film Festival.

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We all refer to ourselves as AFOLs, absolutely -- an adult fan of Lego.

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It all comes on the heels of a massive year for the Danish toy maker.

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Lego reported [$]1.1 billion in profits for 2013, making it the most profitable toy company in the world --

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not bad for a company with an expired patent that nearly went belly-up a decade ago.

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They got themselves into businesses they didn't understand.

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Some of them might have been good for another company, but they weren't good for Lego.

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David Robertson is a professor at the Wharton School of Business and author of Brick by Brick,

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tracking the company's battle back from the brink.

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He says for years the success of Lego was directly tied to toys based on two film franchises, Star Wars and Harry Potter.

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In 2003, there is no movie from either franchise,

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and they are left with 94 percent of their product line, which is unprofitable, unpopular,

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and in some cases just not very Lego-ee, and so they were really close to bankruptcy.

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Lego jettisoned the un-Lego-like products and changed their focus.

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Lego pays $3 per kilogram and sells it $75 per kilogram.

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And so they are making a lot of money on the boxes of bricks,

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but the kids are buying the story, really.

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The company has expanded to create Lego video games and reached out to girls with more gender-neutral ads

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plus new Lego Friends and Lego Disney Princess products.

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Hello, I'm Emmet.

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This year, Lego bet big on telling their own story,

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teaming up with Warner Brothers, the sister company of CNN within Time Warner, to make The Lego Movie.

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We certainly hoped that what we were creating would be very appealing to families with children,

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and what we found, I think, is that it has far surpassed and really engaged and entertained audiences that we probably didn't even imagine.

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The film has been a monster hit, bringing in more than $450 million worldwide,

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and Robertson thinks Lego may have something even bigger in mind.

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It's not an accident that the week the movie came out there was [were] over a dozen different kits in the stores

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that kids could buy and play out little dramas from... within the movie.

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I really see Lego as moving away from competing with Mattel and moving toward competing with Disney.

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Competing with Disney?

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Lego executive, Michael McNally doesn't go that far, but he says the company sees potential.

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The idea that we can be an inspiration for motion pictures that are engaging in the way that we found this film has been is truly exciting for us.

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In other words, Lego will keep turning those plastic bricks into cold, hard cash.