‘The LEGO Movie 2’ Writers Talk Plot Details, Spin-Offs

Originally, ‘The LEGO Movie’ writing and directing duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller planned to act solely as producers on the sequel. But that’s changed, and the pair will now write the screenplay (though they are still not directing), as well as produce the sequel and its planned spin-offs. Lord and Miller have previously revealed little about ‘The LEGO Movie 2,’ but in a new interview they’ve opened up about why they decided to write the script, and deliver a few details about the sequel as well as the LEGO Ninjago and Batman films.

Lord and Miller sat down with Empire for a revealing interview, in which they confirmed that they won’t be returning as directors for ‘The LEGO Movie 2,’ and how the LEGO Ninjago and Batman spin-offs are their own separate entities:

We’re writing the sequel right now and obviously producing all the other ones. There’s a challenge to make each one feel like its own thing. Part of the fun is finding people like Charlie [Bean], who’s doing the Ninjago movie, and Chris McKay who did so much on the first film. Each of them have their own distinct voices and ideas for tone. So it will each have its own personality and not just be, ‘Hey, remember that last movie? Here’s another one just like it!’ So that’s been a big challenge but so far it’s been going better than I expected.

As for why they changed their minds and decided to write the script for the ‘LEGO Movie’ sequel, Lord and Miller explained that the production team came up with a story that was too great to ignore:

[Chris] McKay and Jared [Stern] and Michelle [Morgan] all worked on the movie a bit in our absence and really cracked the beginnings of a story and got us really excited; excited enough to write it. We should be writing right now.

They went on to explain that so far they’ve mostly done a lot of outlining for the story and given the sequel a title (which they did not share). They also revealed a few details about the plot, explaining that the sequel takes place four years after the events from ‘The LEGO Movie’ (the sequel will be released four years after the first film):

Well I don’t want to give you spoilers but we were really interested in what happens to that boy who’s in the meta story in the first movie when he’s four years older. When he’s an adolescent how does that change his point of view? And it’s nice to have the characters start in a different place from the first movie. Emmet, for example, was in an existential crisis of having seen another dimension and was questioning the whole point of his existence.

We’re definitely pleased to hear that the pair are revisiting the meta element from the original film, and the notion that the LEGO characters’ story is changed and shaped by the point of view of an evolving child is pretty neat.

‘The LEGO Movie 2' will hit theaters on May 25, 2018. ‘LEGO Ninjago’ will be released on September 23, 2016, and ‘The LEGO Batman Movie’ is coming on May 26, 2017. There’s also an untitled LEGO movie project scheduled for May 24, 2019.