The follow-up to Lego Batman: Legacy Of The Dark Knight is apparently not going to be Harry Potter, but it’s unclear what will take its place instead.
At one point there were two, or even three, Lego movie games coming out every year, back in the Xbox 360 era when games were a lot quicker to make. But in the modern era there’s been a lot longer gap between each one.
Before this year’s Lego Batman: Legacy Of The Dark Knight the last new game was Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga in 2022, which means there probably won’t be another new one until around 2030. A new Harry Potter game has been rumoured for a long while but apparently both it and Marvel are missing out on the next slot.
The information comes, not from a video game insider, but a Lego leaker, who claims that all Lego Marvel games have been put ‘on hold for the unforeseeable future.’ He also claims that the next Lego game will be a ‘major Warner Bros. IP’, that isn’t Harry Potter.
Warner Bros. is a big company, that owns a lot of IP, which is one of the reasons Paramount Skydance is so keen to buy it, although it’s not 100% certain that deal will go through.
Gaming has been an increasingly small part of Warner’s business in recent years, but a new financial report this week revealed news of Hogwarts Legacy 2. It also talked up the success of Lego Batman: Legacy Of The Dark Knight, pointing out that it’s the most critically acclaimed Lego movie game so far.
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That seems to suggest that Warner Bros. is interested in more Lego games, but it was always a little odd that they were making games based on Marvel, when they’re the arch rival of DC Comics – which belongs to Warner.
As long as the games made money for both parties nobody seemed to mind, but that was back when they could be knocked out quickly, so it’s not surprising things would be different when Warner has to wait four years to make a game based on IP they don’t own.
The only surprising part of the rumour is that the leaker seems to rule out both Harry Potter and Dune as the next game (there is one Lego Dune set but the idea of a game always seemed unlikely).
The question now is what is the next game? Is it another Batman game or perhaps some other part of the DC Comics universe? That seems the most obvious guess, but it could be literally anything else, from Lego Mad Max to Lego Looney Tunes (that would actually be great), or that Lego Clockwork Orange game that’s bound to go down well with seven-year-olds everywhere.
Perhaps the most obvious guess, if it’s not Harry Potter, is Lord of the Rings, but although there have been Lego games based on it in the past, it’s no longer clear if Warner Bros. owns the rights. When it comes to Lego they may instead belong to Amazon and/or Embracer Group, but you’d probably need a room full of copyright lawyers to know for sure.
That alone suggests that it’s probably not that either, which leads us back to something to do with DC Comics. With the film Man of Tomorrow due out next July, perhaps it might be a Superman equivalent of Legacy Of The Dark Knight. Although 2030 is far too late to work as a tie-in or a salve for the fact that this year’s Supergirl was an enormous flop.
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