Phil Lord, Chris Miller and their producers Chris McKay and Dan Lin led a panel for The LEGO Movie at Comic-Con today, bringing a gag audition reel with their characters (including Liam Neeson's Bad Cop and Morgan Freeman's Vitruvius as well as Will Arnett's Batman, Chris Pratt's Emmet etc.) to amuse the crowd.
Miller and Lord confirmed that they have new voice casting. They have cameos from different Lego sets that they can't talk about, but Channing Tatum is playing Superman, Jonah Hill is playing Green Lantern, while Cobie Smulders will be the first film incarnation of Wonder Woman.
The new footage shown included audition footage for the Lego characters, with Lego Batman taking time away from sending Bat-mail on his Bat-phone and taking selfies in order to say "I'm Batman" - but only when they threatened to replace him with Superman. Lord and Miller played Lego versions of themselves, while Chris Pratt's Emmet went through different iterations of his character and Will Ferrell's villain slagged them all off.
"It's so hard; there are so many Lego universes so we had to cross our fingers and hope we get to make more," said Lord in describing how they decided what to cover here. "We started with the fan films and went from there. I insisted on having a classic space character, because that's what I grew up with."
"His mom sent his original set to us and we actually used it in the movie," said Dan Lin.
"Part of it is CG and part is real Lego, but we don't want people to know which is which," said Miller. "There's nothing in it that isn't made out of Lego. The explosions are Lego, everything. We wanted to make it feel like someone could make this in their basement - although I don't recommend it; the Lego ocean would cost a fortune."
"This is the first movie we've ever made that people are excited about," says Miller. "People were always sceptical about us before."
"I think it's inherently punk rock to make a kids' film, and this is the weirdest kids film that's ever been committed to celluloid," says Lord.
The film's been made in LA, Australia (where much of it is being animated) and Denmark, near Lego headquarters. The LEGO Movie is out next spring.