Why Phil Lord & Chris Miller Had To Fire Will Arnett From Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs

According to Lord, “Every five-minute sequence was a really funny sequence unto itself,” but the movie didn’t work as a whole with Arnett in the lead. “The studio basically blew the movie to bits and were like, ‘start over,'” the filmmaker added. Both Arnett and Poehler were fired from the film as part of the “blowup.” Ultimately, Hader and Faris were chosen to replace them, and the film would go on to help launch Lord and Miller’s very successful career, which includes hits like “21 Jump Street” and the Oscar-winning “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.”

Sad though it may have been for Arnett and the filmmaking duo at the time, everything came back around a few years later. They would ultimately cast the actor as Batman in “The LEGO Movie,” which became a smash hit, paving the way for “The LEGO Batman Movie” as well. Miller explained that when Will’s name came up for that role, they made sure the same thing wasn’t going to happen twice.

“Years later when we were making The LEGO Movie we were like, ‘You know who would be perfect for Batman is Will.’ We were like, he may not want to talk to us again. We went to the studio and said, ‘We want to hire Will but we have a thing: no matter what he has to stay this part. We cannot fire him no matter what happens. If you fire us, that’s fine, you’ve got to keep him on.'”

Arnett may not be Flint Lockwood, but he got to be Batman, and that’s not a bad deal.