In the mid-2010s, Warner Bros. briefly turned LEGO into one of Hollywood’s most consistent movie franchises. The runaway success of Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s 2014 hit ‘The LEGO Movie’ spawned a 2019 sequel and the 2017 spin-off ‘The LEGO Batman Movie’, an instant hit, led by ‘Renfield’ helmsman, directed by Chris McKay. Not long after, the studio announced that a second movie about the superhero voiced by Will Arnett was in the works.
Unfortunately, it is unlikely that this project will come to fruition. In 2020, LEGO signed an exclusive movie rights deal with Universal, which prevents Warner Bros. from making more sequels to existing movies in the LEGO universe. But that doesn’t mean McKay didn’t think about the planned sequel. In a new interview with him Uproxxshed some light on his plans to expand the animated superhero franchise.
“We had a really fun script with Dan Harmon and Michael Waldron, and we wrote a really fun ‘Superfriends,'” McKay said of the LEGO sequel, which never materialized. “The sequel would have been a quasi ‘Super Friends’ movie, with a sort of ‘Godfather II’ structure, with Batman and the Justice League facing a modern-day problem, Lex Luthor and OMAC, while at the same time flashing the reasons, which make Batman and the Justice League – and especially Superman – bad blood. The film will explore the relationship between Superman and Batman in a very different way than it has ever been seen, including Superman’s alienation from humanity and how difficult it is to truly be friends, true friends, over the years. This finally answered the question: How do you become super friends. And there will be a crossover with a major franchise that can only happen in a LEGO movie.”
While McKay has moved on to live-action projects, his enthusiasm for the LEGO source material and the film’s whimsical animation style is still evident. In a 2014 interview with IndieWire, he talked about the unique creative process that went into the films.
“Obviously, we wanted it to be as similar to the brick movies as possible. So we wanted to find a way to express that,” he said. “And a lot of the movie is CG and trying to look like stop-motion and trying to make it look imperfect and not smooth. It establishes what is real and something that has charm and innocence and naivety… the epic vision of what a child can dream up.”
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