Will Arnett‘s turn as the voice of Batman in The LEGO Movie was so memorable that Warner Bros. didn’t hesitate to make plans for a spin-off starring everyone’s favorite masked vigilante. The LEGO Batman Movie will reintroduce Gotham City’s Dark Knight, voiced once more by Arnett, as he takes on the Joker and co. while dealing with his all-too-familiar inner demons.
Batman’s own LEGO feature has a star-studded cast which includes Ralph Fiennes as Alfred, Michael Cera as Robin, Rosario Dawson as Batgirl, Mariah Carey as the Mayor of Gotham City, and Zach Galifianakis as The Joker.
"Zach and I had a really fun session a little while back," teases Arnett in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. "I've known Zach forever. The dynamic we landed on for Batman and the Joker that really works for us, I would describe as"¦ refreshing. It's a little bit surprising. It's not what people are accustomed to with regards to these two characters."
As hinted at by the movie’s teaser trailers, the movie will be poking fun at all the previous incarnations of Bruce Wayne, which Arnett dived into for ‘research’: "When we were first finding the Batman voice and finding what was making us laugh the first time around, it took us a beat to wade through the different things we liked and found funny about each Batman. I tried to look at all of the Batmen. Now, I feel like I'm in a zone where I'm just really lucky that I've got all of these great guys who played Batman before me, and the comics before that, and I get to draw on this deep well and just mix and match."
The LEGO Movie‘s version of Batman was but a glimpse of the huge dose of crime-fighting fun that the standalone is promising. "Sometimes what's funny is when Batman is at odds emotionally with what we think we know about him in our version," says Arnett. "We have moments where we make him a little bit insecure, and moments where you make him weirdly confident in ways he doesn't necessarily deserve to be."
Plans for the Batman spin-off were announced six months after The LEGO Movie’s premiere in February 2014, but Arnett shares that Warner Bros. had already decided on doing the side-sequel just days after. "The returns kept coming back bigger and bigger, and we felt really good about the movie and were all out celebrating "” everybody that was part of the team, the studio, the producers, the cast "” and it was kind of tipped that night. "˜Alright, next up is Batman,'" Arnett recalls. "And I was like, "˜What?! Really?' They're like, "˜Yeah man, let's do it.' That's literally how it happened.'"
Fans of the moody and incredibly arrogant (and hilarious!) version of Batman will be thrilled to know his LEGO return will delve deeper into his psyche, during downtime from fighting crime of course. "What came out of The LEGO Movie was the idea of, Batman's the Dark Knight, so why is he so moody? What's going on? Why is he so banged up? And wouldn't it be fun to get in there and explore that?" says Arnett.
Some of The LEGO Movie’s best moments were totally improvised, and Arnett practically tells us to expect more: "[Exploring Batman's moodiness] was always the intention, but as you record a few sessions and you get on these tangents, you end up taking the entire story down a road that wasn't necessarily the intended road. It can totally drastically change the narrative just through goofing around."
The LEGO Batman Movie is set to hit cinemas on February 10, 2017.
