After giving us our first look at Captain Underpants earlier today, Entertainment Weekly is back with another new superhero-themed image, this time from The LEGO Batman Movie. Set to feature a more moody Caped Crusader (voiced by Will Arnett) than some of the other films that have revolved around the hero, seeing him all dressed up for a party does seem a little out of character.
In fact, this version of Batman isn’t into socializing at all. As director Chris McKay explains to EW though, with a little nudge from Alfred, a reluctant Bruce Wayne changes his mind about heading out for a night on the town:
“In all the Batman movies, there’s always a big gala, but one of the things Batman doesn’t like doing is going out and seeing people and carousing as Bruce Wayne. He thinks Bruce Wayne is a bummer. He’d much rather be doing Batmanny things,” says McKay. “But fortunately Alfred (Ralph Fiennes) entices him to come out of the Batcave by telling him, ‘Look, if you go out tonight to this gala, you can have a tuxedo dress-up party.’ So in this shot, this is one of the many tuxedos that Batman tries in a sort of dress-up party montage like Sex and the City.”
Further on in the interview, McKay explains that him and his team wanted to keep everything feeling very silly, ridiculous and also, “very LEGO-y” – even despite the more brooding version of Bats:
“How do you get Batman to come out? What does Batman like? What do they do in Batman movies like this, where there’s always a gala, everyone’s always dressed up, and there’s always some kind of confrontation?” McKay continued. “We wanted to have fun and have things that were silly and ridiculous and also very LEGO-y: The fact that you can just pop different costumes on people really fast, which is something we did in the first movie.”
Back when The LEGO Movie hit theatres in 2014, it took everyone by surprise with its charm, wit, laugh out loud gags, beautiful animation and colorful cast of characters. It certainly set a high bar for all the spinoffs it’s now spawned (aside from LEGO Batman, we also have Ninjango coming up as well as The Billion Brick Race), but from what we’ve seen so far of Chris McKay’s film, it looks like it’ll have no trouble re-capturing everything that made the original so special.
The LEGO Batman Movie will swoop into theatres worldwide on February 10th, 2017, at which point Chris McKay’s standalone pic will face, erm, stiff competition from Fifty Shades Darker and the Keanu Reeves-fronted John Wick: Chapter 2. Regardless of how McKay’s solo effort fares, the future still looks incredibly bright for Warner’s bustling LEGO universe, what with the aforementioned LEGO Ninjago Movie (September 22, 2017) and The LEGO Movie 2 (February 8, 2019) cramming up the pipeline.