The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part is now in theaters, and Screen Rant's Ryan George is here to take you behind the scenes of what (probably) happened in the pitch meeting for this improbable sequel.
The LEGO Movie, directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, was released in 2014 and - despite pretty much everyone being skeptical of the concept - was surprisingly entertaining. Then again, if anyone was going to make a movie based on a block-building toy franchise work, it was the guys who managed to make a movie reboot of 21 Jump Street work. Lord and Miller returned as producers and screenwriters for The LEGO Movie 2, which was directed by Mike Mitchell and Trisha Gum. In addition to much of the original movie's voice cast returning, the sequel also added Tiffany Haddish as the extremely suspicious Queen Watevra Wa'Nabi and Stephanie Beatriz as her sidekick, General Mayhem.
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Since The LEGO Movie 2 was released five years after the first movie, and is bursting at the seams with meta references, the story naturally also takes place five years after the evens of The LEGO Movie. Endless attacks by the DUPLO aliens have left Bricksburg in ruins, giving rise to a new city: the grim and gritty and way more mature Apocalypseburg. The only person who hasn't managed to adapt to the new status quo is the ever-cheerful Emmet (voiced by Chris Pratt), but he'll need to toughen up in order to rescue his friends from the Systar System. Check out the pitch meeting for The LEGO Movie 2 below (warning: it contains spoilers).
Following the success of The LEGO Movie, which grossed $469 million worldwide and got "Everything Is Awesome" stuck in people's heads until they started to go slightly insane, Warner Bros. also released The LEGO Ninjago Movie and The LEGO Batman Movie (the second was a modest success, the first... not so much). There's also supposedly a LEGO racing movie on the way called The Billion Brick Race, which was originally supposed to release in May 2019, but seems to have gotten stuck in development hell after losing two different directors.
Warner Bros. may well decide to slow down their LEGO movie franchise plans in the wake of The LEGO Movie 2's box office disappointment. However, according to director Chris McKay there's a LEGO Batman sequel in development. Can LEGO Batman swoop in and save the day? Possibly with a musical number? We'll have to wait and see.