#plot ramble

As mentioned in my last post, this would be early-Ninjago based, mostly just adapting season one and the pilots. However, we're thinking about this as a two-hour movie, so it isn't going to have the time that a full season would. I'm also thinking about this as part of a duology because there is no way that (provided the first movie doesn't COMPLETELY suck) Lego won't do a sequel to capitalize on the new medium and marketability

With that being said, I would ignore the serpentine for this first live action film. The villains would be Garmadon and the skeleton army, led by Samukai (underrated villain in my books). This could also save us from some terrible CGI snakes; I think the skeleton army would translate better to live action than the serpentine would

Like I mentioned in my last post, the baseline plot would be the ninja collecting the Golden Weapons. It's a very rushed plot line in the show since it happens in the pilots, which means there's a lot of room to explore and develop it without being too much of a direct comparison to how it's done in the show. In addition, it gives a great chance to give each of the ninja their own focus, unlike the Lego Ninjago Movie which really only gives character development to Lloyd.

I'm going back and forth with this, but as of now I'm thinking that Nya does get kidnapped by the skeleton army like she does in the original pilots. However, instead of her playing the damsel in distress role like she is in the pilots, she gets more of her season one characterization and gets to go on her own subplot of breaking out of imprisonment and she's the first one to meet Lloyd

So like halfway through the movie the ninja are on their way to one of the Golden Weapons that Garmadon is about to grab and they basically run right past Nya, who's running away from a skeleton hoard that she'd managed to singlehandedly escape with a new little brother in tow.

Throughout the movie the characters are told that they have elemental powers inside of them that can be channeled by their weapons, not controlled by them. As each ninja gets their weapon they unlock their powers, and all the ninja kind of use their powers through their weapons... until the climax scene, where Kai is the first one to use his element without having to touch the sword (kind of doing the "true potential" moment without calling it that)

It would actually be kind of cool if the weapons weren't named after their elements in this version and the ninja don't find out what their element is until they get to use it for the first time. Like they go after the Golden Scythe and none of them have any clue what it'll do until Cole grabs it and then can suddenly make earthquakes. Like, theoretically if Jay had been the one to grab the Scythe, then it would have channeled his lightning and been a Scythe of Lightning... could also lead to a lot of foreshadowing about other elemental masters existing, since I don't think they had initially planned that with the first two seasons and it always made it a little weird to me that the Special Golden Weapons Of All Creation TM were tied specifically to these four random dudes. The Golden Weapons channel any element, the ninja just all have their preference of which one they use lol

we should drop some foreshadowing about the Megaweapon too, I think that would be great material for a second movie if we make collecting the Golden Weapons a big part of the first one

Having the Golden Weapon Quest TM as the central plot for the movie is also great because it gives the villain a reason to be doing something too. I'm scared of the live action movie that gets released having a one-dimensional Garmadon who just... is evil... and does evil... No. Here, he actually had a reason to be doing his evil things; he wants to remake Ninjago in his own image, and he needs the Golden Weapons to do so. Thus, collection competition.