PSA: UCS Millennium Falcon looks to be retiring soon

[Something_Awesome]

I went to the LEGO site to see if they had the Harry Potter Great Hall. It was no longer shown on the Harry Potter page. I searched "Retired Product" in the search bar and it brought up a lot of sets that are either retired or are officially designated as retiring soon. However, what surprised me is that the UCS Millennium Falcon appeared on search. It is not too uncommon for sets to appear on searches for retirement even though the product page of the given sets are not labeled as "retiring soon" because they are flagged for retirement internally.

So this is just a heads up because I know this is a very expensive set and many people can just come up with the money to buy this set on a whim; proper advance notice can help. I expected this set to have a 5 year life. So now I too need to give this set consideration. I regretted not getting Cloud City and the Death Star playset; don't want to regret this one.

[LDigital]

Dont sleep on it .  outside of mocs, its the best and most satisfying offical build I have ever done

[MSY-MSP]

I am not sure that it actually is retiring soon.  I ran the same search on the Lego site and it came back with over 500 sets including some sets that just came out this year.  So I am not sure of the accuracy of using that as a guide. 

If you go by the list it shows 3 UCS sets, which I cannot see them retiring 3 UCS sets all at once.  The only one that is listed as "retiring soon" is the A-wing.  My best guess is that the sets listed in this group of sets are sets that are likely to retire in later parts of 2022, which makes sense as Assembly Square is in this list and it is rumored to be retiring in 2022. 

[Sine qua non]

Not to mention that LEGO sent out a e-mail recently that it was back in stock. 

Edited October 8, 2021 by Sine qua non
Missing info

[Something_Awesome]

I suppose it could be retiring in 2022. Perhaps it is in a queue to retire. In any case, I am definitely now going to have to reconsider the order of sets to buy. I was going to buy the Cantina in November because I figured the Falcon would be around for a long while. And while 500 items did come up with the search, there is a very long list of sets retiring this year according to promo bricks, and many of the other sets part of the 500 sets that came up were also retired already. I did not find it practically to do a very thurough audit of the sets. But enough big sets came up that I knew was retiring to make me concerned.

As for people getting an email the set was in stock, I do not rely on things like that as it comes to retirement. There have been sets whose retirement was imminent and yet they were restocked. Likely because even though they were scheduled to retire, the manufacture cutoff was not yet reached. 

[Paul11283652]

It’s not on the list of retiring SW sets in Australia and apparently will still be available until the end of 2022. I don’t really see the point in retiring it anyway. As long it’s not troubling the production of other sets and the build techniques are not outdated they could keep it in production it as there will always be a market for it.

[macaron35]

I have a friend working in the retail, his store is selling toys including Lego, told me that the UCS MF is always in top list of Lego bestselling sets.

He recently met with the Lego representative as he receives plenty of sales calls since the end of August to prepare 2021 Xmas catalogs and anticipating 2022 sales too, he has been told that Lego has no plan to retire this set for the next 2-3 years because Disney is preparing plenty of new things and sales are doing too well to consider retiring the UCS MF among expensive sets

[KevinMD]

Star destroyer on the other hand…

[RichardGoring]

9 hours ago, KevinMD said:

Star destroyer on the other hand…

Does that not sell well, or it's just on the list to retire next year?

[KevinMD]

37 minutes ago, RichardGoring said:

Does that not sell well, or it's just on the list to retire next year?

I can’t speak to sales figures but with the ATAT coming I doubt we see three big UCS on shelves together long. Falcon is more iconic and a single ship versus the fleet of ISD or ATAT and I see them balancing the scales to one empire set.

[TeriXeri]

As far as Star Wars UCS Retiring :

• A-Wing 31 December 2021 
• Star Destroyer 31 December 2022 
• Falcon + Gunship 31 December 2023

Source : Brickset set end dates they recently added.

 

Edited October 10, 2021 by TeriXeri

[RichardGoring]

1 hour ago, KevinMD said:

I can’t speak to sales figures but with the ATAT coming I doubt we see three big UCS on shelves together long. Falcon is more iconic and a single ship versus the fleet of ISD or ATAT and I see them balancing the scales to one empire set.

Ah, good point!

[Sucram]

Absolutely essential set, well worth the price.

[NathanR]

Could the "retirement" be part of Lego's move from plastic bags to paper bags for the parts? Lego had a press release out about this a few weeks ago, numerous sets would retire and reappear with same set number but paper packaging. They were keen to stress that baseplates would not actually retire!

https://brickset.com/article/64935/paper-bags-to-replace-plastic-ones-inside-sets-starting-in-2022