Matt Reeves’ The Batman won’t be released until 2022 thanks to COVID-19 throwing the theater business and movie production in general into disarray. This is good since, really, the entertainment world doesn’t need to be dangling incentives like smokey-eyed superheroes in front of a public that really ought to be staying at home for the time being. The only drawback to the delay is that we’re now up against roughly two years of The Batman existing primarily in the form of a moody, Nirvana-infused trailer that fans will obsess over until the movie finally comes out.
The Joker-like madness borne from obsessive Batman fans watching this trailer over and over again has already surfaced in a horrific Cats mash-up. Now, it’s driven a group of animators to recreate the teaser clip entirely with Lego blocks.
The stop-motion video, posted by Jeremy “Joebor1777" Borchers and created in collaboration with 12 other animators, is good work. The original trailer’s audio plays over scenes of Lego figures wrapping up plastic corpses with duct tape, wobbling around crime scenes and intricately constructed secret hideouts, and getting their sneering cartoon faces beat in by Batman’s twiggy little fists. It looks great. It’s a really impressive creation.
The only issue we have with it is that its existence also forces us to think of the other die-hard batheads out there, marking Xs on each day of their calendars and counting every minute until The Batman’s release. How will all of these other people channel their excitement for the movie into creative projects? Will we see more horrible Cats-style mash-ups? Or will we get a wave of fans who choose the brighter path, creating their own versions of the trailer using Duplo, Mega Bloks, and Playmobil pieces? If only there was a Batman villain we could turn to who knows how to predict the outcome of binary, good-or-bad events.
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