Lord & Miller On "LEGO" Future

"The Lego Movie" writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller spoke with Empire recently about their plans for the LEGO film franchise

First up, the pair promise that the "The Lego Batman Movie" will acknowledge all of the various screen incarnations of the character:

"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."

The pair also say that there are plans in place for a LEGO Cinematic Universe, despite each of the upcoming films like " Ninjago," "Batman" and "The Lego Movie 2 " film series being tonally different:

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."

The duo tell The BBC that "LEGO 2" will likely feature more female characters.

The first film only had three female characters, and one of them was a cat.

Lord says: "It's important to us that the movie plays broadly and that we inspire young women as much as we inspire young men... There's been a real shortage of [female protagonists] in recent years, and I think that the near future will be very different. You can feel that the whole movie culture is now starting to wake up to the fact that half the audience are women. Frozen is reflective of that - and I think we are all going to find a great flourishing of women film makers and subject matter in the future."

Neither of them would say whether the lead character would be female, but that is because they haven't even really begun writing the follow-up yet beyond a basic outline.

Lord says: "You would think there would be be more pieces in place but all we've written is 'Fade In'..."

"LEGO: Ninjago" is currently slated for a 2016 release, "LEGO: Batman" is coming in 2017 and "The LEGO Movie 2" is hitting in 2018.