On February 10 2017, audiences around the world will be sitting down in cinemas to watch the much anticipated LEGO: Batman movie. 48 days later, Australians can do the same. Village Roadshow is repeating history, making the same mistake it made with The LEGO Movie. A five million dollar mistake. A mistake co-CEO Graham Burke said the distributor would not be making again. Everything is not awesome. @BrickingAround LEGO Batman will be released in Australia on 30th March, 2017. — Roadshow Films (@RoadshowFilms) December 5, 2016 Piracy of The LEGO Movie cost Village Roadshow "somewhere between $3.5 and $5 million in sales" Burke revealed at a government-led Copyright Forum back in September 2014. "We made one hell of a mistake with LEGO," Burke said of the decision to delay The LEGO Movie's release in Australia by 54 days. "We'll now make all our movies day in date with the US. I know 20th Century Fox are and Universal are too." Adding insult to injury both films were created here by Animal Logic, and the CEO Zareh Nalbandian has spoken out about piracy in the past, expressing a wish to teach kids about the impacts of piracy on creators before they become teenagers and stop caring.
So why, two years later, is this happening again? Expect to hear reasons like "school holidays" and "maximising audiences" being floated, but we've reached out to Village Roadshow for an official comment. This story originally appeared on Gizmodo A great Batman movie, a great superhero movie, and a gloriously bonkers expression of the sublime silliness of crime fighters in capes, and our love of them. I’m “biast” (pro): really liked The Lego Movie I’m “biast” (con): nothing (what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)(Say it in a low growl for best effect.) The little Lego minifig in black actually works as a superhero. Of course he appeared in The Lego Movie a couple years back, but he was a joke, a sideshow, a parody of the Dark Knight. Would spinning him off into his own movie work as anything other than a caricature, and wouldn’t he be just one joke stretched too thin across a full movie? Wouldn’t the few things that made The Lego Movie stand apart from all the many movies it was aping — The Matrix, Star Wars, every hero’s journey story ever — get lost when it embraced full on an already well-known story?
Wouldn’t its plastic-brick-based metaphysical take on the precariousness of our understanding of the nature of reality get lost in the snarking?All of that could have happened, I suppose, but it didn’t. The Lego Batman Movie is a great Batman movie. Maybe the best one yet. It’s a great superhero movie… definitely among the best ones ever. And that’s not in spite of the fact that, yes, it is a parody of Batman, but because of that. Making fun of all the ridiculous clichés and motifs of superhero stories allows Lego Batman to transcend them even as it celebrates them. This is the most gloriously bonkers expression ever of the sublime silliness of crime fighters in capes and tights, and the outrageously over-the-top supervillains they love to hate, and our worship of tales of their exploits. Look: Lego Batman opens with 15 minutes of all-in, all-out action smash-up spectacular, the sort of thing typically considered suitable these days to serve as the climax of a superhero flick: the ending of the film, not the beginning.
But this opening sequence goes beyond even that: it brings together just about every bad guy Batman has ever battled — well, the Joker (the voice of Zach Galifianakis: Keeping Up with the Joneses, Birdman) brings them together — in a mad plot to bring an ultimate destruction to Gotham City. Of course Batman (the voice of Will Arnett: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, Men in Black III) stops them. It’s all done in Lego bricks and minifigs, true — oh, the clarity of the plastic in 3D IMAX! — and it hilariously sends up every trope of the dramatic and critical superhero battle. I was breathless with laughter and nerd joy by the end of it. But where the heck can a movie possibly go from there? I was afraid I had just seen my worst fears realized: there wasn’t much more to say, and Lego Batman was going to pad out another 90 minutes not saying it.Lego Batman keeps finding an ante to up in a way that I never could have expected. There is awareness among the characters here that they are living in a world of interchangeable bricks: Batman is a Master Builder who can make new Bat vehicles on the fly, which is a clever way for the script* to deal with the urban destruction left behind when metahumans fight;
the bricks can get reused right away. But if Lego Batman doesn’t quite get into metaphysics of awareness like its progenitor did, it does get into the metaphysics of pop culture. Best to know as little as possible going into this movie, so I’d never spoil it for you. But I can say that Lego Batman is one of the most beautiful and outrageously funny expressions yet of the mashup, fan-fiction fan culture that has developed around geek memes and the merry playfulness of geeks. Lego Batman’s kiddie-level but still very insightful comic psychoanalysis of Bruce Wayne is barely the beginning of it. Its spot-on snarky confrontations with superhero rivalry and the bromance between heroes and villains isn’t quite yet the beginning of it. Its references to every other Batman movie (and the TV show!) is still barely the beginning of it. Reaching out across the fourth wall to deal a smack to Marvel superheroes is starting to be the beginning of it. But it still has a very long way to go before it is done.