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

Bill Hader famously voiced Flint Lockwood in 2009's "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs," as well as its sequel. But it was originally "Arrested Development" star Will Arnett in the lead role before he was fired from the film well into production. Why was Arnett removed from Phil Lord and Chris Miller's animated hit? Apparently, he just wasn't a good fit for the lead, at least according to the studio.

Lord and Miller appeared on an episode of the "Smartless" podcast, which is co-hosted by Arnett with Jason Bateman and Shawn Hayes, and the subject of his firing from the film came up. Admittedly, they all seemed to have no hard feelings about it now, but the actor was certainly bummed at the time. Addressing the topic, Miller had to say about it:

"We cast Will in the lead for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. The studio did not think he was the right voice. They thought he was too old sounding for the character... We tried to prove everyone wrong and said, 'You don't understand. He's really funny. He's great, he's vulnerable, he's wonderful, he's fantastic.' We tried, and they said no."

Lord then chimed in, offering some further context. After screening the first chunk of the film with Arnett as Flint and "Saturday Night Live" star Amy Poehler as Sam Sparks (the role that eventually went to Anna Faris), it simply didn't click.

"I will say that this is 100% on us because we had a first-act screening that went great. Then, we put the whole movie together with Will's voice... We put the whole movie together, and it sucked. The reason the whole movie sucked is because we were good at making you pay attention for 20 minutes at a time. But when you have him for a whole movie, if the audience can't really root for the main character and get on board, I don't care how funny it is, they go to sleep."

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.