The Lego Batman Movie was a critical and commercial hit, earning more than $US300 ($416) million at the box office in 2017 — and yet, a sequel will never happen. That’s because Lego ended its partnership with Warner Bros., which owns DC Comics and Batman, and signed with Universal instead. But director Chris McKay has revealed what the sequel could have been, and it sincerely sucks that we’re not going to get it.
McKay talked to Uproxx about his upcoming film Renfield, as well as a variety of things including his proposed Nightwing movie that will also likely never happen, although maybe once new DC head honcho James Gunn gets his “Phase 1″ out of the way, things will change. But McKay also detailed what he’d hoped to do in a Lego Batman sequel, and frankly, it sounds wonderful:
“We had a really fun script with Dan Harmon and Michael Waldron, wrote a really fun kind of Superfriends. The sequel would’ve been a quasi Superfriends movie and the structure was going to be a sort of Godfather II kind of thing with Batman and the Justice League facing a modern-day problem, Lex Luthor and OMAC, while at the same time flashing back to the reasons why Batman and the Justice League — and in particular, Superman — have bad blood. It was going to explore Superman and Batman’s relationship in a very different way than you’ve ever seen it portrayed, including Superman’s alienation from humanity and how hard it is to truly be friends, real friends, for years. It was ultimately going to answer the question: How do you become Super-friends. And there was going to be a crossover with a major franchise that can only happen in a Lego movie.”
A Lego DC superhero movie, structured like Godfather II, centred on a dysfunctional Justice League, co-written by Community’s Dan Harmon? My god, what could have been! Alas, there’s a zero per cent chance that Warner Bros. is going to licence out Batman to another movie studio basically ever. But at least we now know what we missed.