You’ve got one movie. I feel like Zane’s character, before we found out he was a robot, was still plenty interesting enough, and the reveal kind of cheapened it.
Over time, of course, they found other ways to develop his character (and I’d say he’s turned out better than most of the others, he’s had at least a few decent arcs) but you need a few movies to really do that idea justice without also cheapening his prior development as a human character, unless you give him an awful lot of focus (which I wouldn’t want to do in a live-action adaptation - I think you’d start with Kai, but once the four are properly introduced you’d be dividing the screentime among them pretty evenly.)
And @Racie02 is right that it also wouldn’t suit with the less technological tone that I believe would be a better fit for the movie.
tl;dr - Zane’s robot stuff over-complicates his character, isn’t at all necessary to still hit the right emotional tone for him, and takes more time than it’s worth for a single movie.
But that’s the thing. Zane being a robot explained why he had his personality quirks, and it kickstarted a whole new emotional arc for him-which is exactly what a sequel should do.
I guess I probably found it worse because it was about the time they started making the other three ninja all a bit more samey than they originally were. I found it compelling enough that he was the odd-one-out before learning “oh, he’s different because he’s literally not human. Ok.”
You make a point, and like I said, there’s potential for it in development down the line if it’s handled very well. But it’s certainly not worth tackling for a single movie, which was more the direction I think this topic was asking in.
I mean, yeah, I guess I see how you would think that. But if they did make a whole series of live-action Ninjago movies, then this would inevitably happen.
I just have to say, I’ve thought about it what it would look like… nothing comes up. I can’t imagine Ninjago not lego on my own. There were those little backstory sequences in SotFS, and I feel like that kind of gives me an idea, but it’s still too animated.
TBH, I hope that if they ever do make a live-action Ninjago movie, they do a better job than the Ninjago movie did. I don’t want to offend anyone that might’ve liked it, but it just doesn’t feel like the original Ninjago. And then they changed the appearances of the show’s characters! I mean, I’d understand why they’d do that but aren’t people going into the show gonna watch the first 7 seasons first?!
I’d like it if they made a live-action movie that didn’t screw up the TV show. That’s my only request.
There are people on DeviantArt that have drawn up what they think a live-action Ninjago would look like, with the characters as humans instead of Lego minifigures. I would provide links, but if I did, the mods might see it as advertising and block this post, so…
And they showed up in Season 13, too.
I don’t know that it was supposed to. The reason why the filmmakers decided to start up a whole new canon was for pretty much the same reason Bionicle G2 was a full-on reboot-to make it easier to draw in new fans without having to explain the mythos.
There was a time where I would have agreed with you, but I distinctly remember having a dream once where Ninjago was actually a licensed theme based on a non-Lego IP, weirdly enough.
Okay, so I looked on deviantart and pinterest for Ninjago fanart and wow, a lot of it’s really well done. I feel like that kind of stuff gives me an excellent idea of live-action ninja. I saved some of the things I found on my pinterest, under the same username.
I think that a live-action Ninjago movie should keep the looks from the pre-SoG, though. I don’t know how easy it would be to get actors that fit the ninja’s descriptions, but I’m not expecting a live-action movie anytime soon, maybe years later.
I also found a link on these very well done Ninjago posters on the same website as this! It’s also ttv so I don’t think it would count as advertising: Ninjago Season Posters
