brickbride

Yes, StoneWars speculate that the horses will be brick built.

Yes I know. I just used 2025 as a comparison.

??? I'm talking neither victims nor perpetrators, it's just a fact. Stuff like Notre Dame, Neuschwanstein, the solar system model, a Hogwarts express booknook, Sherlock Holmes, One Piece, Pokemon, Star Trek ... have all been done by other brick companies first. Are you telling me that LEGO wouldn't gauge their sales before making their own versions?

Like I've said, the numbers for 2026 start at 76334 and we're up to 76329 now (Miles Morales Mask). I cannot find anything for the numbers in between. Could be skipped numbers but with such a lot of them in a row there might be other explanations as well, such as a D2C (or, say, sets that have been delayed until later in 2026. Or cancelled altogether).

The three Spidey 4+ sets for 2026 start at 11206. We've had three so far this year (the dino ones, 11998 through 11200), so that tracks with the list for January/probably March 2026, but judging by the set numbers we can expect up to five more this year. This subtheme seems to be doing well so I'd expect additional numbers for 2026 to eventually pop up, too. The rest of the numbers start at 76334. I cannot find any current or leaked set for 2025 that goes higher than 76329, so that's several numbers still unaccounted for? There's also a gap in the leaked 2026 list with 76339 and 76340 both missing. I know skipped numbers are a thing but it might also mean something else (retail exclusive, D2C, or just sets that come later in the year). And would Marvel and DC set numbers usually follow right after each other, or could the gap mean a switch between themes as well?

76459 (8+) 76460 (7+) 76461 (8+) 76463 (9+) 76464 (12+) 76466 (18+) 76467 (10+) 76470 (10+) There's quite a few omissions here, with 76462, 76465, 76468, and 76469 all currently unaccounted for. I'm expecting one or two retail exclusives out of these at the very least. Or possibly just sets that will come later in the year. Just as a reminder, 2025's numbering was all over the place. I.e. we had 76441-4 in January, then 76445 (Herbology) announced for June, then 76446 (Knight Bus) delayed from January to March, then 76447 (Flying Lesson) again in January but as a retail exclusive.

I see the same problem here as with the Death Star comparison: Hogwarts is the main and most iconic location of its franchise, Minas Tirith is not. You can put a microscale Hogwarts up as a display and it will look complete, but a microscale Minas Tirith won't look as complete without a microscale Shire, Rivendell, and so on to go with it. Then again, there's unlicenced microscale Minas Tirith sets by competing companies, I tink, so you might be in luck, since LEGO do seem to have made it their mission to pull all their competitors' best-selling products into their own portfolio.

Yes, 12 sets total for the Doomsday year sounds like not a lot. Not that I'm surprised. That said, are these for sure all the set numbers? Over at HP we're currently learning about several 2025 sets that had not initially been announced (retail exclusives, D2C ...). So there might be more.

Barad-Dur is an iconic location, Fellowship or not. The giant black tower with the eye on top is recognisable enough that, as @Lordhelmetsays, it even worked as a Batman movie villain. And again the main problem with Minas Tirith compared to other locations is scale. And again I do think we'll get Minas Tirith if they continue with the series. I just don't think we'll get a UCS 10.000 pieces Minas Tirith that's minifig sized while featuring the entire city on the hill plus the Pellennor Fields. A set the size of the Shire featuring the heart of the city seems entirely doable. (As does a microscale set of the entire city but that would not display well with the other LotR sets so I cannot really see it.)

It's definitely one of the more iconic locations, no doubt about that. But I think people have more of an attachment to Bag End (as the starting and end point of both LotR and the Hobbit). Or Rivendell which again appears in both LotR and the Hobbit and is a major starting point as well (the birthplace of the Fellowship). With Minas Tirith, you have an iconic look (comparably to other locations like Barad-Dur) but one that's hard to recreate in LEGO form due to its sheer size, although again I think a set just focusing on the area around the palace and the White Tree could look pretty good, the yellowing issue notwithstanding. Action-wise however, comparatively little happens within the city compared to its size (again I'm not talking about the Pellennor Fields) and most of what happens there has negative connotations (especially Denethor learning of Boromir's death and then completely losing it), so I just don't think most people would look on it the same as they would look on Rivendell or the Shire. Someone made the Star Wars comparison a few posts ago. Of course LEGO have no qualms about depicting warfare, but you know, it's Star WARS. It's hard to find anything iconic in that theme that's not either some sort of weapon, flying or otherwise, or the site of a battle. With LotR, right now they seem to try and emphasize more the magical look of Middle-Earth. Their version of Barad-Dur's interior is ridiculously tame given its nature; the library/office and cantina levels could be seemlessly transferred to a Hogwarts castle set and wouldn't look out of place there, and the skeleton in a cage looks like something right out of Ninjago. And Gollum being tortured there has been turned into "Gollum's hideout". If we get Minas Tirith I'm pretty sure it will be in its white splendor, not besieged with bloody ramparts, fires, and corpses everywhere.

If they make a truly gigantic set maybe. But I'd rather expect us to get a Minas Tirith focusing on the area at the very top (the size of the Shire set) and possibly but not really likely a seperate Pellennor Fields/city gates one. A EUR 1.000 Minas Tirith seems really unlikely to me for reasons explained above. Also LEGO seem to shy away from depicting actual warfare so far. We've had two idyllic locations and even Barad-Dur had a rather cutesy interior given the subject matter. A battlefield's not likely IMO.

It's been ages since I've read the books but when I think Minas Tirith, I think the White Tree, Houses of Healing, Denethor's seat, and so on. The Pellennor Fields are not the city proper. In LEGO terms that would be an entirely different set and I don't think we'd get Frodo and Sam with Minas Tirith, either.

The piece count for Arkham is IMO not enough to do a modular version of the kind of building that Arkham is. But then again I thought the same about the X-Mansion, and the result shows that yes you can do it at this piece count, it just won't look good. So I'm kind of expecting the same here: a building with architecture that's supposed to be imposing but which really looks tiny and cramped compared to everything else (except the X-Mansion I guess).

Also the Death Star is probably the most iconic thing about Star Wars next to the Millenium Falcon. It makes sense for those two to be the uber-pricey flagship sets because for many people, if they only buy one Star Wars set in their lives it's either of these. Minas Tirith isn't in the same category IMO. It's an iconic location, sure, but not the most iconic, and not the most plot-relevant or the most beloved either. If I remember correctly, several of the most important characters like Frodo and Sam never even set foot there. People want it for reasons of completionism and they want a large version because the architecture requires it but I don't know. Who's really going to be satisfied with having Minas Tirith as their only LotR set? I don't think anywhere near as many people would buy it at the EUR 850-1.000 price point as would buy the Falcon or the Death Star.

If LEGO wanted to do traditional Castle as a theme (other than throwing people the occasional bone with nostalgia bait like Eldorado or with Creator sets) they'd be doing so already. Adding magic would barely change anything since traditional Castle had witches, wizards, and the like anyway. It would also overlap too much with both D&D and HP, I think. Again, the only way I could consider them doing anything castle related for a new in-house theme is if they could modernize and update it, and they've already tried that with Nexo Knights. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough about my meaning before.

Looks like a pretty full and detailed greenhouse to me. There's the lack of doors (and with the way the trees seem to grow through the roof it might not have a full glass roof either), but then the Owlery was like a quarter of a tower and the Boathouse didn't have doors either. It's par for the course. I wouldn't pay EUR 50-60 for this, though, but that's LEGO pricing for you. If you got into the new system with its very unfinished EUR 200 Great Hall and EUR 80 Flying Lesson followed by a EUR 250 Tower, presumably you can afford it. The Monster Book looks really neat but not like something I'd want or need, it's kind of an outlier that doesn't fit with anything else. I wouldn't spend EUR 60 on something like that. I still wonder if you can store stuff inside like in the trunks, though. Neville is also a very random choice of minifig to go with it and at the same time a boring one, seehing how often we've already had him. Why not Hagrid (as the teacher) or Draco (like in the old 4750 set)?

I do understand your point. I think you're missing mine. :-) Sure a set with Cap, Hulk, Iron Man, Black Panther and the likes would sell the best. But most of those characters are dead or retired by now. So they have a choice of, like you've said a) going with their second-tier New Avengers, b) going with plot-relevant characters that seem to be well-received by adults like the Thunderbolts, or c) going with cameos of genuinely popular characters like the X-Men. All I said was that for kids, the best option out of those three would be whichever characters have fun looks and powers regardless of their sympathetic portrayal or their importance to the plot. It's not like many kids would probably even see or understand Doomsday, and the popular classics like Cap and Iron Man are no longer an option for tie-in sets.

I'm sure they get "named" characters in the sense of movie extras that have a name slapped on them like Daphne Greengrass, Leanne, and Terry Boots. LEGO know that named characters sell because some people need to collect'em all. The layout for the Main Tower is plain ridiculous with all the challenges in the underground section and the payoff being over Dumbledore's Office. So you enter the Forbidden Corridor, get past Fluffy, fight your way through the underground section, then take the perfectly regular and accessible stairs, then enter Dumbledore's office, and through it access the Mirror of Erised? WTF? What's even the point of the challenges then? Also if we go by the previous track record, all the challenges are going to look bad since those slide-out modules are designed to be replaced. (Not that they didn't look bad in the Fluffy Encounter but that was the low point, or one of the lowest points, of the previous system instead of the norm.) Quirrell not being in this set where he's really needed but instead being in the previous one where he wasn't is not great, either. I wonder if that's going to become a pattern, LEGO putting characters in sets where they don't belong just so you'll have to buy more sets. Like maybe later on we get a Quidditch set with players from three Houses but not from Slytherin so you'll have to complete it with the Slytherin player from this one. Also three storeys spent on nothing but stairs sounds boring (though I'd expect us to get the portrait of the Fat Lady at the very least) and Dumbledore's office looks like the underwhelming version from the 2018 and 2021 systems rather than the cool, elaborate 2001 version. An easy pass for me. I wouldn't expect more than two, going by the Thestral Carriage some years back. Actually a Thestral in the style of Hedwig, Fawkes, and the Horntail (with moveable wings) could be a pretty neat idea but I'm pretty sure that's not what we'll get. And all of LEGO HP's recent efforts to portray buildable creatures (Buckbeak, Hedwig at Privet Drive, and the sorry excuse for Hedwig in the motorcycle set) looked like crap. So I'm kinda dreading this one. I'd expect those interior-only sets to be mainly focused on the classes, as more or less a successor to the Moments books. There's still Trelawney's class, Moody's class (and possibly Lupin's and/or Lockhart's as well), and that's if they stick to the ones that have been done before instead of making up new ones. I could also see them doing such modules as an update for the smallest sets of the past like, say, Freeing Dobby.

The usual place has a breakdown of recent rumours by whether they're expected to be real. The Disney Princess advent calendar goes under "previously mentioned". Colour me surprised that they'd chance another one; the last one was heavily discounted by LEGO on their own website (as was the Spider-Man one but those were the only ones I can recall, and it's already been rumoured that Marvel won't get one this year). Also, Disney has a target group that overlaps a lot with that of Friends, and several stores in my area had 2023's Friends AC on the shelves next to the 2024 one last year so I'm not sure why LEGO would want to cannibalize their sales even further. But we'll see.

The usual place has new rumours around April's Fool Day sorted by whether they're considered real or not. There's one called "Luffy Brickheadz" which is filed under "definitely coming, no info though". HP has had packs of five brickheads (one for Prisoner of Azkaban comes to mind), how about the Straw Hat Crew? Though the fact that it's called Luffy Brickheadz as opposed to something else makes me think it's maybe just a two-pack of Luffy and someone else like Shanks or Buggy the Clown. Then they could do Zoro paired with Mihawk next, and Nami with Arlong or Nojiko, and Usopp with Kaya or Yasopp, and Sanji with Zeff.

That's what I suspect, too. Must be the wings. Someone recently pointed out that the Fell Beast GWP for LotR is so expensive on the secondary market not because of its exclusive minifig but because of the beast's exclusive fabric wings, and that the new Smeagol GWP isn't expected to fetch the same sorts of prices despite having two exclusive minifigs. Then again, the Horntail had fabric wings, too, and that doesn't seem to have increased the price that much (it was a EUR 10 increase from Hedwig and Fawkes if I remember correctly, but still well below .10 per piece). But that was a couple of years ago and set prices have become more and more ludicrous lately. The GoF Brickheadz is 671 pieces according to the usual place. The Luna one is 292. (Most HP two-packs had around 260 though the closest comparison I can find, 40631 Gandalf and the Balrog, had 348 pieces.) 40677, the PoA Brickheadz, was 697 pieces for a five-pack, roughly the piece count of the GoF one, so I'm expecting five there again. Might be the Triwizard champions and someone/something else. Or if they want to go really dark, Harry, Cedric, Mad-Eye Moody, Pettigrew, and baby Voldy. :-)

But everyone knows who Iron Man, Cap, Hulk, and Thor are. Now the MCU's down to mostly unknowns however you spin it. How many kids are even going to see Doomsday? If some popular characters have a sufficiently large role in it, great. If not, I bet kids would be happy with whatever visually cool figs LEGO can come up with as an alternative. (Not moviegoers which is why I worry that the planned Marvel mash-up might make for cool sets but not necessarily for a watchable movie.) How many kids care about Harrison Ford's president character and its complexities in BNW, and how many want the jet because it has a cool-looking red version of the Hulk?

So? Just make it swappable with the charms class which in turn is swappable with the transfiguration class from the Flying Lesson. That location does technically count as "on top of a tower" and I don't think LEGO will care any further. Again, their last RoR was on the ground floor with a rock base when it's on the seventh floor in the books. (It was also twice the height of their last "Great" Hall.) And the 2018 system had a so-called Hospital "Wing" that definitely wasn't a wing of any description (and also had the bar for the clock play function smack dab across the middle for patients to trip over). LEGO tend to be very enamored of Gryffindor House, much like the books and movies themselves, so if we get the Gryffindor Common Room I'd expect Gryffindors galore. I'd definitely expect Angelina and/or Dean Thomas as some of the few named characters of colour. Oliver Wood or Percy might be another option for a partial reuse (Percy in the Burrow was in his pajamas but they could at least reuse the face, plus there's the older prefect minifig from the book; Wood was in the Flying Lesson so they'd just have to replace the torso with a generic Gryffindor one).

Interesting analysis, and I agree for the most part about Marvel's position. But LEGO is in a different position IMO. LEGO doesn't need a new crop of characters people care about in order to sell sets. They need either sets that are good on their own notwithstanding the figs (such as the Daily Bugle), or variants of popular figs, or just new figs that are either visually appealing or just appeal to collectors because of their uniqueness. Sure there's a certain amount of people who want the Thunderbolts as minifigs, and LEGO might pick up on that now already and plan for them to appear in a Doomsday set (your option two). Less so the FF since they already get their own set, unless Doomsday provides us with notable variations. But kids won't care whether a character's important for Doomsday, whether he's portrayed sympathetically, or anything like that. They want cool-looking figs with cool powers that can be translated into LEGO visuals (shooting multicoloured beams out of their hands, having a cool gagdet like Green Goblin's glider, and so on) and the X-Men should be able to deliver here, moreso than the Thunderbolts. Many adults will collect any new variant of a popular character so that's option three, again. I'd think that LEGO might focus on both of those options and only sprinkle the new Avengers throughout the sets, and then focus on the ones that have cool looks and have never been made before (such as Wiccan).

I wouldn't expect the DH version to be an interior-only set (if only because of the Fiendfyre snake), though that could work for the OotP version which is more likely IMO since we haven't had that for some time. I wouldn't expect us to get it now either way. Also LEGO seem to think that the RoR is located on the ground floor as per the latest iteration. 😉