The LEGO Movie is one of the best films of the year, bursting with imagination and colorful characters, so you can understand our excitement to watch Warner Bros. expand that animated universe in the coming years. The studio certainly isn’t resting on its laurels with the property – by 2019, we’ll have seen LEGO Ninjago, The LEGO Batman Movie and The LEGO Movie 2. Recently, during an Empire interview, The LEGO Movie writer-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller revealed some details about upcoming titles in Warner’s LEGO-verse.
Specifically, Miller noted that The LEGO Batman Movie will add to the Caped Crusader’s cinematic legacy by putting a LEGO spin on all of the past big-screen incarnations of the character. That’s right – everything from the classic Adam West cartoon up through Christian Bale’s garbling-marbles take on the character is fair game for director Chris McKay and his scribe Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies):
Miller: “Rest assured that every era of Batman filmmaking will be acknowledged. There have been so many interpretations of Batman and there is so much to play with there. There are 40 versions of his origin story alone.”
Though Lord and Miller are not heavily involved in The LEGO Batman Movie, the pair are so highly valued at Warner Bros. that it makes sense they would be brought on board to advise on every LEGO movie the studio plans to put out going forward. In the same interview, both reflected on the future of the franchise as a whole:
Miller: “The thing is about these movies is that each of them have their own tone and their own voice. We’re doing this Ninjago one with Charlie Bean, we’re working on the Batman one, and each one of them feels like its own movie, but obviously they all exist in the universe that the Lego movie existed in, and so finding that balance has been part of the trick.”
Lord: “It’s like we started with The Avengers and now we’re going to spin off and explore the different worlds, then come back.”
Will Arnett is confirmed to reprise the voice of the Dark Knight in the upcoming Batman spinoff, which is also very exciting news. The actor quickly made Batman his own in The LEGO Movie, turning what could have been a supporting character into a comedic secret weapon, so it will be interesting to see what he does in a stand-alone vehicle.
The LEGO Batman Movie will soar into theaters on February 10th, 2017.
