On Monday, I was thinking about The Lego Movie (as I am wont to do) and I posted this little missive on Twitter:
Marvel must not have wanted their heroes in The Lego Movie. Wonder if that's going to turn out like Mattel not wanting Barbie in Toy Story.
— Robert Brian Taylor (@robertbtaylor) January 6, 2014
Surprisingly, my tweet was retweeted by Peter Lord, the co-director and co-writer of — you guessed it — The Lego Movie, which I took as tacit confirmation that my guess was accurate: Higher-ups at either Marvel or their parent company Disney didn't want little Lego versions of Iron Man, Thor and the rest commiserating with the Lego versions of DC's Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman that DO appear in the film. Both Disney and Warner Bros. have toy contracts with Lego, which sells building sets featuring their superhero characters, but only Warner Bros. allowed their DC heroes to make the jump into The Lego Movie.
Now, on the surface, this makes some sense. Marvel's characters are in full multimedia bloom right now with their movies earning huge box office, one TV show on the air with more on the way and a variety of Marvel cartoons doing well for The Disney Channel. There are even Lego Marvel shorts on the Net. The company's execs are likely just thinking: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. On the other side, however, DC's comic characters are in a bit of disarray. Chris Nolan's Batman franchise is over. Green Lantern tanked. Man of Steel under-performed globally (earning only about half of what Iron Man 3 did). They've got Arrow going on the small screen, but their big screen vision seems limited to throwing everything including the kitchen sink (or, as you know him … Ben Affleck) at Man of Steel 2/Superman vs. Batman and hoping it works. In WB's eyes, letting Lego use funny little plastic-looking versions of their heroes in a movie can't possibly hurt, it can only help.
And even though I understand them declining, I wish Marvel felt the same way. After all, no one is going to be less impressed by The Avengers 2 just because a Lego version of Captain America was the butt of a few jokes in a gonzo animated comedy. It's not often that IPs from competing companies get to share the screen. It takes a special type of project for that kind of mash-up to make sense, although they do occasionally come along. Filmmaker BenDavid Grabinski was quick to point out one to me:
https://twitter.com/bdgrabinski/status/420293628720730112
He's right. That's a great example. Considering Roger Rabbit's plot puts the entire cartoon universe at stake, it just makes sense for Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse to be co-mingling in that film. And it's such a unique and singular project that you'd be hard-pressed to think of any negative repercussions for the studios that own those IPs that could come from it.
Another good example is Disney's Wreck-It Ralph, which features videogame characters from a host of companies in a story about what goes on inside the machines after an arcade closes down for the night. Five minutes into the film you've got Nintendo's Bowser and Sega's Dr. Robotnik taking part in a self-help meeting for videogame villains, and the movie is more textured for it. And, yes, I realize Nintendo and Sega aren't exactly competing businesses anymore, but Wreck-It Ralph features characters owned by a smorgasbord of game companies, from Capcom to Konami to Square Enix. They all understood the value of lending a few of their IPs to Disney for this project, and it paid off by having those characters featured in a wonderful movie that promoted videogames in a positive light.
The Lego Movie feels like a similar type of project to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Wreck-It Ralph and Toy Story … the latter of which I mentioned in my original tweet. The legend goes that Barbie was in early drafts of the script, but when Mattel wouldn't allow Pixar to use her, the character was changed to the more generic Bo Peep. Barbie only entered the Toy Story universe after the first movie had exploded (no doubt boosting the sales of the real-world toys that appeared in it) and Mattel relented for the sequel. It was a missed opportunity then, just as it feels like a missed opportunity for Marvel now.
So maybe we'll get to see the Hulk throwing down with Superman in The Lego Movie 2. It's not like those two will be duking it out in live-action any time soon, and that's totally understandable. But Lego versions of Marvel and DC's heroes intermingling? That just makes too much sense.
