brickbride

Just found this on Amazon: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/LEGO®-Harry-PotterTM-Luna-Thestral/dp/1837250812# At first glance, there doesn‘t seem to be anything exclusive about Luna? They must like the subject matter a lot, though, because we've already had the Thestral Carriage and now we are to get Brickheadz as well.

It says Hermione. She actually does have a ponytail on occasion, for example here in DH:

Quoting my own predictions from mid-March. I had Harry in place of Hermione and figured that at this price point we might get more than six figs, but otherwise I was spot on.

But the microscale DA isn't a D2C, is it? The D2C is a whole other story, but given that it's several years old I don't expect continuity there.

At this point I hope you are right. Otherwise EUR 380 seems like a ripoff for what sounds like 2 to 3 (if that) 16×32 baseplates worth of houses. I'm kind of baffled that they have just given us a microscale DA where Fortescue's was clearly not a corner building and are now deviating from it already.

I wouldn't call a tinsel-decorated weapon (and that's what an AT-AT is) a fun holiday set. That's pretty much akin to a tank with a red ribbon and a sprig of holly tucked into it. And it's made so much worse IMO by LEGO being adamant that religion - including, you know, Christmas - is against their policies unless they can use it to make more money. Such as by perverting weaponry into fun holiday decorations. They'd never make a nativity scene (like Playmobil and COBI have) because that might be controversial. Instead, they give us non-denominational holiday murder vehicles for everyone!

Sure, but she's absolutely irrelevant to the story. Whereas, say, Draco and Snape are not but neither made it into the set. Or if they had just wanted a female and a Ravenclaw torso, Penelope Clearwater would have been a much better choice.

Isn't there also a rumoured 40806 Christmas AT-AT over at Star Wars? LEGO must be desperate for content by now.

Well this is clearly a collectible series, so they had to do it at a price point similar to the helmets. The Black Panther bust was EUR 350! If they made that a regular thing, hardly anyone would buy every single one for completeness' sake, instead people would pick and chose which characters they liked best. Which isn't what LEGO want. They want predictable sales and to know that once you start your collection you won't stop till you've caught them all. I've said it before but the Black Panther bust to me always seemed to be a badly disguised attempt to cash in on the actor's death (let's "honour" a random superhero with a completely new type of product after his popular actor has just passed away). Sure Black Panther isn't a nobody but if they'd been serious about establishing busts at this price point as a thing (and like I've said that's not really a price point lending itself to a series of collectibles), they would not have started with him. They would have started with the obvious contenders like Spidey and Iron Man, as they've just proven here.

I do agree that the problem lies partly with the source material; there's too few female characters and those are often not depicted positively compared to the male characters. (It's less obvious in the movies but the books make you wonder about JK's attitude towards her own gender.) It's therefore no surprise that LEGO love sticking Luna into random sets (such as the 2021 Chamber of Secrets where she's not even mentioned in the source material) or pick Hermione over Ron when they need two of the trio so that they can gloss over the imbalance. Even then, like I've said, LEGO themselves create an imbalance and prevent people from getting more female students at cheaper price points. The Cho polybag was a one-time exception but there should be more sets like it. I also agree with @BrickBob Studpantsthat HP still has relatively more female representation compared to other licenced themes, but that by itself is something that should not be glossed over. (And don't even get me started on this year's updated Slave Leia over at Star Wars!) And frankly it's not as if they made much more of an effort with their unlicenced in-house themes. The only laudable exception was Friends. Before the reboot where they changed it because we can't have even one theme where girls don't play second fiddle to boys. /rant

I meant allowance-friendly sets. Like Aragog, Ford Anglia, Draco polybag, Harry polybag. Maybe you could include Charms Class which would give you 1 female minifig for 8 males, but the others you named are all pricier.

LEGO HP have been shafting girls for a while now, every affordable set including polybags since the Cho one has been Harry and Ron. Or Draco. The Reobrix set is a book nook and looks great, but it has like 3.000 pieces. At LEGO's piece count bookends make sense. EDIT: According to reddit there's also a non-licenced bookends set that looks similar (google Magic Railman Train).

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).