Praise4Media #72 - The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part

The original Lego Movie was great a fun nostalgia trip for adults and a decent mix of humour of set-pieces to advertise lego products to our younger audience. A sequel to this was inevitable, and Phil Lord and Chris Miller, two still popular writers, were on board. So why did this film flounder at the box office? What went wrong here?

The film had critical success, but not the same level as the first one, though still an impressive 84% compared to 96% for the first one. The drop off with audiences is a bit steeper with a 68% rating down from 87% but why is that? I have some theories but let’s start by diving into the story.

RageLite review - The Lego Batman Movie

I wasn’t intending to do this one, but it’s a leadup to another review so here we are, the Lego Batman movie.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t enjoy the movie, far from it, but the reason I don’t review it is the same reason I haven’t done an in-depth review of a lego short since way back when I did Star Wars, there’s precious little to say about them. Most of the jokes in them are self-referential, either to the fact that they’re Lego or to various plot elements of the story it’s based on. They’re designed to sell Lego merch to children first and foremost. The Lego Batman is a good kids advertisement, don’t get me wrong here but its humour is satirical and it’s difficult to explain why I like it without also spoiling the jokes, plus unlike with the Lego Movie, there’s no overt real world allegory to it.

Still, it’s hardly surprising that Lego Batman would get a spinoff. Warner Brothers already owns the rights to the character, there have been 3 Lego Batman games and various Lego shorts based around Batman, plus Batman is still DC Comics’ most popular character. The film made a reasonable $312m on its $80m budget, not quite as much as its predecessor but enough to call it a success. And it has a pretty stunning 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes with a 9.5/10 average score.