So far, the Lego Batman games have differentiated themselves from the other licensed Lego games in that they haven’t adapted the stories straight from the movies. While audiences can play through the Death Star trench run or the tank chase from The Last Crusade in the Lego Star Wars and Lego Indiana Jones games, they can’t play through The Dark Knight’s opening bank heist or Batman Returns’ Christmas tree set piece in the Lego Batman series. Instead, each Lego Batman game has an original story written specifically for them.
To tie in with Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck getting back in the cowl for The Flash and the introduction of Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne, Warner Bros. should make a new Lego Batman game that finally adapts all the Batman movies and incorporates all the different Batmen (West, Keaton, Kilmer, Clooney, Bale, Affleck, Pattinson, and maybe even Conroy) as playable characters and all the different Batmobiles as driveable vehicles.
In 2008, the series began with the release of Lego Batman: The Videogame. This game was notable for being the first licensed Lego game to eschew the movies’ storylines in favor of an original plot. That plot saw Batman’s entire rogues’ gallery escape from Arkham Asylum and spread chaos across Gotham. They split into three groups, each led by one of the Bat’s most iconic enemies: the Joker, the Penguin, and the Riddler. This premise actually set up a brisk, action-driven story incorporating just about every beloved Batman villain, so it made sense to streamline the narrative that way.
The problems with the original storytelling began with 2012’s Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, which introduced Superman, Wonder Woman, and the rest of the Justice League as playable characters. This time, the plot concerned Lex Luthor’s run for President, but it’s just used for a series of chases and puzzles and most of the action revolves around Luthor’s “Deconstuctor” weapon, not his political power. The game is a dream for fans of open-world gameplay, but the narrative leaves a lot to be desired.
2014’s Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham is where the series really started to lose the plot. Brainiac attacks Earth, prompting an unlikely team-up between the Justice League and the Legion of Doom. This was a promising setup, but the ensuing story is all over the place with repetitive gameplay and random out-of-the-left-field plot points that have nothing to do with any of the rich worldbuilding in the DC Comics universe.
These games are for children at the end of the day, so nobody’s expecting Last of Us-level storytelling, but it’s baffling that Warner Bros. keeps peddling uninspired, perfunctory original stories in its Lego Batman games when there are a bunch of action-packed, visually stunning Batman stories sitting in their library, unadapted into Lego game form. What made the Lego Star Wars games work so well was having Lucas’ familiar narratives as a jumping-off point. No player is ever particularly invested in the story of a Lego game. The point of these games is to play as your favorite characters in a plastic brick-filled environment. Using stories that audiences are already familiar with allows for a healthy dose of nostalgia.
If there’s going to be a Lego Batman 4, it should adapt all the wildly different tones of the movies – the German expressionism of Tim Burton’s movies, the hypercampness of Joel Schumacher’s movies, the gritty realism of Christopher Nolan’s movies, the unabashed ridiculousness of the Adam West movie – into the same game. It could even separate the different portrayals of Gotham into different hubs so players can switch between the gloomy metropolis in Burton’s movies and the seedy urban landscapes of Nolan’s movies.
Since the last couple of Lego Batman games have incorporated other DC heroes and fans have gotten used to that, a third hub could adapt Batfleck’s DCEU films with Henry Cavill’s Superman and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman as playable characters. Zack Snyder’s Gotham is possibly the most stylized to date, taking influence from the sumptuous gothic visuals of the Arkham games. While some aspects of Snyder’s DC movies were controversial and his Batman was criticized for being a cold-blooded killer, no one would complain about the ability to play through the brutal warehouse brawl or fire Batfleck’s pump-action shotgun.
If such a game does end up getting made, it shouldn’t have weird isolated lines of dialogue from the movies like Lego Jurassic World and Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens. These audio clips always sound jarring and out of place, especially when they’re crammed in without the original context. The developers should either get the actors from the movies to come in and record new dialogue, like they’re doing with the upcoming Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, or go back to the classic grunt-based storytelling of earlier Lego games.
It seems unlikely that Warner Bros. will make Lego Batman 4, since the franchise has become much bigger than Batman. Beyond Gotham was followed up with a spin-off entitled Lego DC Super-Villains, suggesting Warners want to move away from the series’ connection to just the Dark Knight and focus on a larger Lego DC franchise similar to the Lego Marvel Super Heroes games. But that seems like a wasted opportunity, because they made three whole Lego Batman games and not a single one used the Bat’s most beloved on-screen stories.