One of the funniest bits in The LEGO Movie is when the Millennium Falcon shows up to come and get Batman. But that Star Wars cameo almost didn’t happen — the makers of the film had to rush to finalize their deal with Lucasfilm before Disney bought the company.
Producer Dan Lin explains to The Hollywood Reporter in a new feature:
We flew up to Lucas Films [in Northern California] and showed them a small sample and they approved. But a few weeks later, Disney bought Lucas. So we had to rush to close our deal with Lucas before Disney closed its deal.
That’s just one of the many narrow scrapes the film had during its seven-year journey to get to the screen, according to the THR feature. Lin had a huge challenge convincing the skeptical LEGO executives in Denmark that a film was even needed, or could represent their toys in the proper spirit. Superman got held up in litigation over whether Warner Bros. even owned the character any more. And they needed to find a way to make digital animation that looked like LEGO bricks — which they did using a program called Lego Digital Designer to create a hybrid of stop-motion and CG animation, “Lego-izing” their storyboard drawings.
One thing that didn’t make it into the final movie: a couple of kissing scenes. In an earlier cut, Batman and Wyldstyle kiss, and you hear a clicking sound as their plastic heads smush together. And there’s also a kissing scene involving mermaids. But these were “too edgy” for the final film.
Tons more details at the link. [THR]
