LEGO Batman Spinoff Exploring Every Era of Batman's Films

We’ve seen Batman envisioned time and again on screens big and small, and yet it took a tiny LEGO version of the character to take us by surprise with Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s hilarious take on the character in this year’s ‘The LEGO Movie.’ Voiced by Will Arnett, this version of Batman lovingly satirized the Caped Crusader. The character was such a hit that we’re getting a spinoff in 2017 ahead of the ‘LEGO Movie’ sequel, and the writers have dropped some details about what we can expect.

Batman’s song, “Untitled Self Portrait,” was such a hilarious and succinct embodiment of the character, somehow taking this one superhero and all of his loaded pop culture history and summarizing him with one song. In a new interview with Empire, Lord and Miller discuss how they’ll be using the character’s vast history to their advantage. Miller says:

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.

Although we recently bemoaned ‘Batman vs. Superman’ including the death of Batman’s parents in the film, as if we need to see that in yet another Batman movie, we’re kind of hoping that the LEGO Batman spinoff includes something along these lines—a joke, a throwaway, anything acknowledging it. A sequel to “Untitled Self Portrait,” perhaps?

And the idea that Lord and Miller, who are only acting as producers on this spinoff, are interested in acknowledging all of the Batman films in this spinoff is very intriguing. There’s immense comedic potential, not the least of which is Bat-nipples.

Lord and Miller also briefly discussed the ‘Ninjago’ movie and how the ‘LEGO’ films will tie together similar to the Marvel approach, which is basically the approach every studio is taking with their major franchises and spinoffs these days:

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.’

The LEGO Batman spinoff hits theaters on February 10, 2017, while ‘The LEGO Movie 2' will be released in 2018.