The LEGO Movie 2 Takes Place Four Years Later

By  · Published on January 7th, 2015

The LEGO Movie 2 Takes Place Four Years Later

Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

Not everyone is looking forward to tons of LEGO Movie sequels, but as long as Phil Lord and Chris Miller are involved we can expect that they are going to be awesome. We just can’t have any doubt with those guys, not after their magical way of turning worrisome projects like Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street and yes The LEGO Movie into brilliant and popular successes. They even showed us with 22 Jump Street that doing sequels isn’t any less creatively bankrupt than doing stuff based on classic children’s books, so-so TV dramas and toy brands.

Sure, they’re eventually going to fall from their pedestal like Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz did in the mid ’90s (sorry for the obscure comparison, but they were the first screenwriting duo I felt I could forever depend on, in my youth). For now, though, we can still be very excited about The LEGO Movie 2, which they’re writing but not directing. And that means that nothing should make us skeptical, no matter what kinds of updates we receive between now and its May 25, 2018, release date.

Note: only read on if you don’t care about SPOILERS concerning the ending of the first LEGO Movie.

One such alarm might otherwise come with the first details about the sequel, which come directly from Miller in an interview with the duo for next month’s issue of Empire magazine. The publication shared some outtakes on their website, including this info on when we can expect The LEGO Movie 2 to take place:

“I don’t want to give you spoilers but we were really interested in what happens to that boy who’s in the meta story in the first movie when he’s four years older,” Miller told Empire. “When he’s an adolescent how does that change his point of view? And it’s nice to have the characters start in a different place from the first movie. Emmet, for example, was in an existential crisis of having seen another dimension and was questioning the whole point of his existence.”

That reminds me a bit of the direction that the Toy Story movies have gone in, dealing with the situation for playthings when their owner grows up and out of childhood. It also makes the sequel sound like it’ll be more of a hybrid, with more live-action throughout. In the same interview, Lord likens the LEGO people to Smurfs, which only adds to the plausibility that these movies could turn into something more akin to those little blue creatures’ own movies (not that I hated the first one). It’s no concern just yet, though, if only because Lord and Miller are still completely trustworthy.

Plus this could all change very fast. According to Lord, at the time of the interview this was the status of the actual script: “We’ve opened a Final Draft document and titled it. I mean, that’s really the hardest part. And we’ve chosen the formatting. That is all that’s happened so far.”

Meanwhile, we’ll be getting the LEGO Batman Movie spin-off first, in 2017.

Christopher Campbell began writing film criticism and covering film festivals for a zine called Read, back when a zine could actually get you Sundance press credentials. He's now a Senior Editor at FSR and the founding editor of our sister site Nonfics. He also regularly contributes to Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes and is the President of the Critics Choice Association's Documentary Branch.