Last year, Universal scored the rights to the entire LEGO franchise in an exclusive deal – snatching up the property from Warner Brothers who managed to produce several movies out of it.
One of the most notable of those was “The LEGO Batman Movie” which was directed by Chris McKay who is currently out doing promotional rounds for Amazon’s “The Tomorrow War”.
Speaking with Collider, McKay says he doesn’t think there’ll be a sequel to “The LEGO Batman Movie” due to the rights shift. That’s a shame because he revealed that “Rick and Morty” creator Dan Harmon and “Loki” head writer Michael Waldron had done the first draft of a script that sounds intriguing:
“It was truly epic… both from an action standpoint and from a story standpoint. The structure was Godfather Part 2… a story about Batman’s relationship to the Justice League (and Superman) now as well as the formative moments of the Justice League (and Batman’s relationship with Superman) then.”
He also dubs the film “Boogie Nights-esque” and goes on to say that while the first film was all about family, and McKay explains the sequel was going to continue evolving that theme: “It was about how hard it is to change. To commit to change. To stay on the new road you’ve carved for yourself.”
He also says the studio wasn’t hot on the idea of the film taking the character seriously:
“The studio was leery of LEGO Batman being an actual Batman movie so I was constantly told to hold back. Audiences (and subsequent movies like ‘Into the Spider-Verse’) proved them wrong. I would have quadrupled down on making it as much of a real Justice League movie (with lots of jokes, cameos, intersecting storylines, references, etc… it would have been a VERY dense movie) as humanly possible.”
As such, the villain was going to be Lex Luthor and OMAC. There was also going to be a “big crossover at one point,” the kind of thing “that will probably never happen in a live-action movie.”
Head over to Collider for the full interview.
