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Chris Miller and Phil Lord are writing The LEGO Movie 2 and talk plot and spin-offs

January 8th, 2015 by Marc Comments

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With a sequel to The LEGO Movie coming, not to mention big screen outing for Ninjago and Batman in his LEGO form, it’s a busy time ahead for everyone’s favourite constrcution toy.

Now Chris Miller and Phil Lord, the guys behind The LEGO Movie, have revealed that they will be writing the second one but not directing… and they had some more info too.

Talking to Empire, the duo talked about their roles in the three upcoming movie: “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.”

“I think it’s nice for all these other films to have their own voice and that’s what’s neat about working with all these other filmmakers, they come up with solutions you wouldn’t think of. Watching Charlie Bean’s sequences for Ninjago is so gratifying because he’s able to make it play without any dialogue and has a really great visual style. It’s really nice and refreshing. I think it would get boring if we directed them all, quite honestly.”

But hadn’t the duo decided to produce the sequel and not write it? “We worried we didn’t have enough time,” said Lord.

Luckily, [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. We’ve opened a Final Draft document and titled it. I mean, that’s really the hardest part. And we’ve chosen the formatting. That is all that’s happened so far. We’ve been outlining a bunch.”

And what of the plot? What can we expect from the sequel? “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.”

Wow, sounds pretty heavy for a LEGO movie but we’re on board because, afterall, everything is awesome…

LEGO Ninjago is out on September 23, 2016, The LEGO Batman Movie hits on May 26, 2017 and the The LEGO Movie 2 is set for May 25, 2018.

Marc is a self-confessed nerd. Ever since seeing Star Wars for the first time around 1979 he’s been an unapologetic fan of the Wars and still believes, with Clone Wars and now Underworld, we are yet to see the best Star Wars. He’s a dad of two who now doesn’t have the time (or money) to collect the amount of toys, comics, movies and books he once did, much to the relief of his long-suffering wife. In the real world he’s a graphic designer. He started Following the Nerd because he was tired of searching a million sites every day for all the best news that he loves and decided to create one place where you can go to get the whole lot. Secretly he longs to be sitting in the cockpit of his YT-1300 Corellian Transport ship with his co-pilot Chewie, roaming the universe, waiting for his next big adventure, but feels just at home watching cartoons with his kids….