While Christian Bale, Christopher Nolan and the rest of Team Dark Knight Rises have been making clear that they intend to finish their involvement with Batman after this film and Warners has been looking get its superheroes more closely aligned, we didn’t expect them to re-cast the Caped Crusader quite this quickly. But it’s true: Will Arnett will be Batman. In plastic form, at least, for Lego: The Piece Of Resistance. Psych!
OK, so maybe he won’t exactly be stepping in to play Bruce Wayne or his grouchy alter-ego full-time and this won’t be considered a brand new Justice League. But Lego co-directors Phil Lord, Chris Miller and Chris McKay are in the middle of making the film and have recruited both Arnett and The Five-Year Engagement's Chris Pratt to provide voices for the hybrid film, which blends live action with CG Lego characters.
Pratt will be Emmet, an ordinary Lego mini-figure who just so happens to look remarkably like the most powerful person in the plastic brick world, the MasterBuilder. He’s recruited by a group of strangers to stop an evil tyrant from gluing the universe together.
And Lord and Miller do seem intent on getting Batman and Superman in the same film: while Arnett is locked (and seems like great casting, since he has the growly voice naturally), the 21 Jump Street duo is trying to woo that film's big success story, Channing Tatum, to voice Superman. But he’s still trying to figure out if he can fit it into his crowded schedule, which already includes White House Down, Foxcatcher, the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending (or whatever it ends up being called) and the developing Jump Street sequel.
The newly titled Lego: The Piece Of Resistance is currently set to arrive in February 2014 for American audiences and likely at the same time or shortly after for us. We were already interested to see how far the people who made Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street would push the idea beyond your usual childhood nostalgia-exploiting CG avalanche, and now we’re even more intrigued…