I'll admit that I was a bit disappointed we were getting a LEGO Batman spinoff before getting The LEGO Movie 2, but leave it to Phil Lord & Christopher Miller to get me excited for it again.  The filmmaking duo are serving as producers on LEGO Batman, and to their credit, they created a fun spin on the character in The LEGO Movie.  Also, while "Everything Is Awesome" is the song that gets all the attention (only because it gets stuck in your head to the point where you want to die), "Untitled Self Portrait" is pretty damn funny.

My main qualm with a LEGO Batman movie was that we've already seen Batman so many times on screen, but it turns out that LEGO Batman will be using the Dark Knight's past on-screen iterations to its advantage.  Hit the jump for more including how the upcoming LEGO movies, including Ninjago, will tie together Avengers-style.

Speaking to Empire, LEGO Batman won't just be the little, claw-handed caped crusader in a tiny adventure.  He's part of a larger history:

Miller: "Rest assured that every era of Batman filmmaking will be acknowledged. There have been so many interpretations of Batman and there is so much to play with there. There are 40 versions of his origin story alone."

It may seem odd that you might be able to get family comedy out of the death of Bruce Wayne's parents, but then again, Lord & Miller's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs has one of the darkest bits of comedy I've ever seen in a PG-movie:

Surprisingly, Lord & Miller also revealed that they're planning to take their LEGO movies in an Avengers­-style universe:

Miller: "The thing is about these movies is that each of them have their own tone and their own voice. We’re doing this Ninjago one with Charlie Bean, we’re working on the Batman one, and each one of them feels like its own movie, but obviously they all exist in the universe that the Lego movie existed in, and so finding that balance has been part of the trick."

Lord: "It’s like we started with The Avengers and now we’re going to spin off and explore the different worlds, then come back."

I'm as sick as anyone of franchises having to be like The Avengers, but if Ninjago and LEGO Batman have to exist on a similar wavelength as The LEGO Movie, then I'm absolutely fine with Lord & Miller pulling from Marvel's game plan.

As far as when we'll actually get to see these movies, Ninjago is due out in 2016, LEGO Batman will follow in 2017, and then we'll finally get The LEGO Movie 2 in 2018.

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Image via Warner Bros.