Chris Nolan Signed off on LEGO Batman

In a recent roundtable interview, LEGO Movie producer Dan Lin talked about the challenge of making an animated film that wasn’t shameless and how serious the production was about using Batman;

"I was inspired by playing with Legos; my son at the time was 5. And it took us five years to make the movie. He’s kind of a free-form builder. He wasn’t following instructions; [he was] building really cool inventions of his own. But also I saw that when he was putting bricks together, he saw a much greater adventure than what was in front of him. And we captured that experience in an animated movie. Chris Miller and Phil Lord, the writer-directors of the movie, said to me, “Dan, we don’t want to make a toy commercial.” And I said, “What approach would you do?” They’re like, “OK, Dan, if we made this movie, this is what we would do: use Lego as an art form the way people paint; the way people use clay. And then let’s tell it as a love story. It’s a love story between us and the Lego-playing experience when we were kids.”"

And when they wanted to use Batman they had to go all the way to Chris Nolan for permission:

"We approached both Warners and Christopher Nolan. And myself, Chris Miller and Phil Lord, we pitched a different kind of Batman. We said, ‘You guys have your live-action Batman, we have what we called the LEGO Batman. A Batman that’s very self-aware. That is, you know, a bit of a jerk at times.’ As soon as they understood there are different universes, that worked out okay,” Lin said. But that was a big challenge going to all the different rightsholders, saying, ‘This is how we’re going to take your character and Lego-ize it."

It’s gone smashingly, as this version LEGO Batman has been awarded his own spinoff film in 2017.