brickbride

All of this! The thing about fan service is that it needs a solid base. By the time "No Way Home" came out, each of the Spidermen had had at least two movies of their own to get the audience to like them and connect with them. (I actually don't think that you can only watch it once - the novelty might no longer be there but Andrew Garfield's reaction to MJ pelting him with bread is still my favourite part even after a handful of watchings. Though that might be in part because I find MJ extremely obnoxious and it's so refreshing to see a Spiderman who's not in love with her reacting to her.) Similarly, a lot of "Endgame" reads like self-indulgent fan service, especially the scene where Tony finally gets to have a heart-to-heart with his father. But that was okay because those characters had earned the self-indulgence, because we'd stuck with them for so long and had gotten so invested in their fates. I'm not interested in fan service about characters I've only seen like once and have no particular reason to care about. For the sake of the continued existence of the MCU, I do hope they'll come up with a good story (not necessarily a logical story as that would be a first for the MCU, but at least a gripping, high-stakes tale) for "Doomsday".

StoneWars has an article up about current HP rumours. The only thing new to me is that it gives the list price of the Herbology Class, in EUR, as EUR 49.99. This is less than I'd have thought given the previously mentioned USD price - however I would not expect a Greenhouse at this price point, given that the Potions Class, a mere interior module, was already EUR 40.

I think most of the HP sales are still accounted for by people outside our AFOL bubble. For every @BrickBob Studpantswho wants to collect all the new minifigs there's ten kids who just want HP stuff - new minifigs or not, doesn't matter. So what we do here doesn't really reflect on sales at all, and most customers learn about the sets when they are either in the catalogue or on the shelves.

Yep.

Just watched the story. It's a picture of two signposts, one for Hogwarts (pointing left) and one for Hogsmeade (pointing right) - from the Orlando theme park I'd assume - with the Hogsmeade one circled and a caption saying "Our next destination". It doesn't mention the set number. Though I agree that @calebcold3's interpretation sounds likely - in fact I've already discussed the possibility here at some length. There's also a bunch of Star Wars leaks and a rumour for the Simpsons in this story, but I don't know enough about either theme to judge them. Sorry not sorry to all the Quidditch fans if the HP one turns out to be correct.

Would make sense, though, given how poorly last year"s Spidey-themed AC was received. They might want to wait for that extra marketing push

They already tried that with HP (76429). :-)

The problem with Fantastic Beasts wasn't so much that it was a prequel (apart from the fact that we knew in advance about some people's survival but that alone would hardly have tanked the series). It was more that the plotting was idiotic even by HP standards (with numerous internal retcons, too), that the main character was quite unsympathetic even by HP standards (the entire first movie can pretty much be summed up as "Let's watch Newt be an irresponsible pet owner who racks up tons of property damage through his negligence, and then let's watch Our Heroes mind-rape Muggles"), and that the series could never decide whether it wanted to be a light-hearted romp with magical beasts or a gritty war drama with Grindelwald. If they had committed to one or the other, given us someone other than Jacob to root for, and had their plots actually make sense (with less of the "Dumbledore's the greatest and Hogwarts is sooooo coool!" nostalgia to boot) I think it would have gone differently. Because really, the idea of exploring what the wizarding world's like for adult characters, and away from that one school everyone in the HP books is obsessed with, is a no-brainer with a ton of potential.

There's also absolutely no way you could get around Hogwarts in a wheelchair unless it could fly.

That's LEGO's new thing. It's even more prevalent in the Friends and City sets where heads with hearing aids, a main character with only half an arm, and a dog in a wheelchair abound. Because we clearly need minidoll/minifig representation for all of that and for every conceivable skin tone and hair type, but at the same time God forbid we get any minidoll representation for any body type other than stick-thin. But that's a rant for another time.

Let me spare you the wait and give you the minifig list right now: 76445 Hogwarts Castle: Herbology Class (59,99$): Sprout, Cedric, Neville, random student that's either not white or has a physical disability or both 76448 Dumbledore’s Phoenix (19,99$): none 76449 Book of Monsters (59,99$): hard to say since we don't know what it is. If it's something like I suspect (kind of a trunk thingie with buildable monsters) I'd say one minifig, most likely Harry or Hagrid. 76450 Book Nook featuring Hogwarts Express (99,99$): none I'd say 76451 Aunt Marge’s Visit (89,99$): Harry, the Dursleys, Aunt Marge (minifig plus a brickbuilt inflated version), Ripper the dog 76452 Quality Quidditch Supplies & Ice Cream (99,99$): Harry, probably Ron, Fortescue; one or two Quidditch-associated students (likely Angelina, Lee Jordan, or Cho Chang); unnamed QQS shopkeep; one or two more customer for the ice cream shop 76454 Hogwarts Castle: The Main Tower (249,99$): yeah not touching that one

I cannot see a HBO show targeted at kids to be honest. I'm of the minority opinion that Alan Rickman was actually a bad casting choice for Snape. I loved him as an actor but he was way too old - Snape's supposedly in his thirties and angry before everything else, not terminally bored the way Alan Rickman did portray his characters so well. That said, I don't think the new Snape will be any more accurate. Maybe his race was never literally defined as "Caucasian" in the books, but given how often JK described him as "pale", "pallid", "sallow-looking", with "marble white" skin "the colour of sour milk", it's quite obvious that he's not supposed to be Black. I would have less issues with literally any other character being given a race change because it just goes against any headcanon I have for him. If anything, the Disney example has probably shown us that sets of reboots do worse than sets of originals. I don't have any sales figures obviously but the Peter Pan Flight Over London set could often be found on clearance (where it was STILL overpriced but that's another matter) and like it has been mentioned here, Arielle's Shell (actually a pretty good-looking set in my opinion) doesn't seem to have been well-received either. So even if LEGO are somehow forced to make sets for the show I don't think they'll make many - simply in order to protect their bottom line.

That's not really a surprise, is it? The only set I can remember that has ever been confirmed in interviews to be the designer's idea (Mark Stafford's) was the Daily Bugle. Some of the worse ones practically scream "marketing decision". Like the Black Panther bust. Sure, let's randomly feel the need to "honour" a random superhero whose popular actor has "coincidentally" just passed away. In other themes it's also becoming more and more apparent that LEGO are looking towards the competetion these days and copying their ideas (not the set designs, mind you, but subjects that already sell). Off the top of my head there's recently been the working model of the solar system (which CADA had first), Notre Dame (done by several competitors while LEGO doesn't do churches, no sir!), the microscale Hogwarts and Grounds (yes LEGO had a microscale Hogwarts in 2018 but the later one including the grounds came after several competing unlicenced products), booknooks including a Hogwarts-themed one based on the Hogwarts Express (which Reobrix already has), Star Trek (for which they took over the licence from Bluebrixx), and Neuschwanstein Castle. Again I don't think that one day a designer just came in to work and went "I want to do Neuschwanstein Castle"; more likely the marketing department went "We're losing market shares in architecture because our customers buy competing products, how can we bolster our portfolio so our customers won't feel the need to buy from other brands? Let's see what the bestselling competing products are and make our own versions." Well could you blame LEGO if that were the case? I agree that Doomsday sounds like the current MCU's biggest hit-to-come, given RDJ's return and the fact that as an all-cast Avengers movie it should at least have SOME characters that any given moviegoer wants to see again. But "Fine, maybe I'll catch that one at the cinema instead of waiting till it goes to Disney+" is still a far cry from the hype we had for Endgame. As for LEGO, on the one hand Doomsday sounds like an even better bet for sets than Endgame because it would feature lots of characters who we haven't had minifigs for, or at least not many. Whereas Endgame had the same bunch of characters we'd already known just in different suits, a plot no-one was allowed to reveal, and a setting based mostly on a) recycled previous locations and b) a bunch of rubble. But on the other hand, a) I think the less-than-stellar reception of the latest Marvel/Disney+ CMF series has shown them that if people don't care for a character they won't want to buy the fig and b) if you want to sell today's overpriced, increasingly crappily designed sets you need to at least include really popular minifigs. I feel like they've been experimenting with this for some time. The only Falconcap set is pretty overpriced but presumably still sells because people want a Red Hulk bigfig. The Hoopty, on the other hand, was ridiculously overpriced and also the only set you could get Monica (apart from the CMF version) or MCU Kamala in. It didn't do well, I think, because not many people want Monica or Kamala to begin with. Eternals had its overblown cast spread out over several sets but most people didn't get into a "collect them all" frenzy because they didn't care about the Eternals in the first place. So even though Doomsday offers, in theory, unlimited possibilites, I can see LEGO still sticking to minifigs of characters that have done well in the past, such as Star-Lord who's been in multiple sets or Doctor Doom whose only previous fig fetches high prices on BL, and rely on those in order to sell the sets. Sure some of us might want a Wiccan minifig and he might well be added to a set because of this, but do you think enough people want a Wiccan minifig that they'd buy an overpriced set just for him?

It should have already been released but I haven't seen it in person, nor the Marvel one so far. Most stores in my town seem to get a ton of Friends and City polybags this year and not much else.

I figured, that's why I put in so many line breaks just to be safe, give everyone a chance to scroll past it. Besides, Doomsday won't come out for some time. By then they might have changed the plot to Feige knows what.

Allegedly the script for Doomsday has SPOILER the Avengers racing Doom for who'll reach Loki's position at the heart of the Multiverse first. So we might still get God of Timelines Loki as a minifig even years after his series has ended. /SPOILER Of course that's very speculative and also subject to change given the timeframe.

EUR 75-90 would frankly be too cheap with the way the playset Diagon Alley has been going lately. QQS and Fortescue's is EUR 100! In fact I've noticed a trend across themes lately where sets with way too few pieces for the price will be EUR 100. Just off the top of my head: Kakamora Barge, King Magnifico's Castle, and 2023 Elsa's Ice Palace in Disney, Hoopty (well it was "only" EUR 95 but it also had only 420 pieces!) and the newly leaked Endgame set in Marvel, the Titanosaurus one in Jurassic World (at least that one has a large new dino), and the Diagon Alley playsets in HP. It used to be that overpriced sets like these were outliers but more and more they're becoming the new normal. No it won't be. I can all but guarantee that. Reasons: - EUR 75-90 is way too little for a house these days unless we're talking Privet Drive - a small, boring house with no exciting architecture. The Lovegood House is all about the architecture! - When we first heard about Malfoy Manor, many people were expecting a mid-size set with just the fight scene. I correctly guessed that it would be priced akin to Grimmauld Place simply because it's a location people have wanted for so long. The Lovegood House is another one of those. The cheapest we've ever had something like that was the Ministry of Magic for EUR 100, and that was years ago - it surely would be about EUR 150 now, too. - Xenophilius Lovegood has never been made as a minifig. If they do make him I'm sure they'll put him behind an appropriately high paywall. (Aunt Marge has not been made either, but that's different. For one thing I'm pretty sure the inflated version of her will be brickbuilt - we might still get a regular minifig but that could probably be cobbled together from existing parts. And Aunt Marge is solely associated with Privet Drive which, as I've said, is a boring location that solely gets made because of its plot relevance - I doubt there'd be a market for a UCS version or even a EUR 150 playset version. Whereas the Lovegood House, people would probably buy based on its architecture alone.)

4851, came out in 2003.

Everyone hated Secret Invasion, even the majority who didn't watch it. Most people would have read up on it at least and the array of unpopular choices (killing off Maria Hill and Talos, marrying Fury to a Skrull who then immediately disappears from the MCU, having Fury harvest everyone's blood in secret and give ALL of their powers to ONE SINGLE stranger, and of course Rhodey having been replaced by a Skrull for Feige knows how long) ist staggering. And then there were interviews with the showrunners basically going "Yeah, we shot some stuff and now we're making up the plot during the editing phase". I think any movie that came right after would have taken a hit because the MCU looked like a joke at that point. And as you've said, Kamala isn't popular either. (Though IMO she's one of the more tolerable young additions to the MCU.) By this point the audience had definitely seen the trend of "Let's have all our established characters play second fiddle to kids" (like Strange and America, or Hawkeye and Kate, or Ant-Man and Cassie). And this movie was even named "The Marvels" as if they'd wanted to make sure no-one could think that Carol was the main character. I remember seeing the first trailer and going "Great, now Captain Marvel, too, has a whiny teenage siidekick who she needs to learn to work as a team with. Not watching that". I think it put a lot of people off. And adding Monica was frankly another way to stack the deck because a) the character would be unrecognisable to anyone who hadn't seen Wandavision way back when, and she hadn't played a large role in it, either (yes I know she was in Captain Marvel's solo movie as a child but that's barely even the same character) and b) she's really unlikeable on the whole. Again, I've never said that Captain Marvel's solo movie's success didn't benefit from coming before Endgame. But many, many other characters had solo movies that did far worse. Ant-Man 2 did far worse despite being by far the best Ant-Man movie (not that that's saying much) and coming at a crucial time for the MCU, too. Yet no-one here claims that Ant-Man cannot draw in audiences even when that's true (just look at the box office figures of all his movies). It's always Captain Marvel.

What about Loki? I have yet to meet anyone who didn't like his series (whereas Wandavision was overrated if you ask me). And unlike Wanda he's shown some real character development that hasn't then been immediately negated. So far at least. I'm so over that "Captain Marvel is a box office failure" narrative some people are pushing. Her solo movie is still in the top ten grossing MCU movies ever. Sure, "The Marvels" bombed, but why do people put the blame for that on her instead of Kamala or Monica or, you know, the fact that "The Marvels" was immediately preceded by "Secret Invasion"? That said, I don't disagree that Wanda is one of the MCU's more popular characters, and probably the most popular female (a fairly easy feat given how much screentime she's had compared to most everyone else and just how few female main characters there are in the MCU to begin with). But it doesn't change the fact that by now she's been painted as an utter villain, and a stupid one at that. Her death was her only redemptive action amongst a bunch of stupid, needlessly villainous choices (and let's face it Wanda was never one for smart or moral choices to begin with, see her and Pietro joining Hydra in the first place). If they retcon that and possibly even try to present her as a good guy again (because she's popular) I don't think it'll work. It's not enough for Marvel to bring back their more popular characters IMO, they should also take a long hard look at them and ask themselves questions like "Does the audience still have a reason to like this person if we bring them back?", and in Wanda's case for me the answer is no. Of course that is probably wishful thinking on my part. It's entirely more likely that Marvel will just go "Whee! Aren't you glad your favourite Wanda is back? Please ignore how she butchered most of the Kamar-Taj wizards in her efforts to murder a child and before that mind-controlled an entire city, and go and buy all our Wanda merchandise! Oh, and be excited about our new Avengers movies which run on the premise of 'No-one but Tony Stark ever dies for real'!!!"

Honestly, bringing her back is another terrible, terrible idea (notwithstanding Elizabeth Olsen's top-notch acting). Wanda's multiversal rampage in "Dr Strange 2" just so she could be with her children already didn't cast her in the best light then (and made no sense in light of "Wandavision" where she'd accepted their loss and was much more focused on VIsion anyway), but it was mitigated by her sacrificing herself in order to destroy all copies of the Darkhold - an evil greater than her own countless murders. THEN we learned in "Agatha All Along" that the entire multiversal rampage was utterly pointless since she could have achieved her goal much, much more easily and far, far closer to home without any bloodshed (not sure how much I'm allowed to say here because spoilers), making her look pretty stupid and even more evil in retrospect. And THEN we learn (which was already implied in "Agatha All Along) that she didn't really sacrifice herself at all? Way to ruin a good character is all I'm saying.

At least then the rooms came with the exteriors! Rooms without exteriors, like the new Potions and Charms class, are a bigger annoyance to me.

Just putting it here, the next version will officially be the "most expensive Hogwarts ever" and will start with a EUR 400 Great Hall. ;-)

"Complete" as in we get the iconic silhouette on the outside and all the most important parts (like the Chamber of Secrets) on the inside. Obviously I don't expect them to cover every single classroom or Common Room (though they seem determined to do the latter anyway). That's several big sets with only two of them done so far (counting the Main Tower) and likely only one more to come if we're going by a three-year schedule. And most of those aren't even particularly relevant to the plot in comparison to others like the Hospital Wing, Forbidden Corridor, Room of Requirement, or Chamber of Secrets, or fun builds with fun characters like Trelawney's class or the various DADA classes. So I'd expect a decent chunk of new sets to either be interiors-only or smaller locations. I really cannot see how they'd make all of that work with only one more year given that so far we've only had 2024 Boathouse, Owlery (both fairly unnecessary and irrelevant locations except to complete the silhouette), Potions class (indoors-only), Great Hall 2025 Duelling Club, Charms class (both indoors-only), Flying lesson, Herbology class (yet another location that's not part of the castle proper), Main Tower. Going by what we've had so far, in 2026 we'd likely get about two small-ish "exterior" sets, a big one, and at least one or two indoors-only locations (most likely classrooms but might be something else such as Myrtle's bathroom). That's not going to cover all of the above that's still missing!

Honestly, if the new leader is the person who's in two of those concept art shots, he's a good choice. (Unless he's written by the same people who wrote Thor 4, then no, just no.) He even has leadership experience of a very diverse group! And more importantly he's fun. Falconcap isn't fun - Captain America wasn't much fun either but that's why we had Iron Man to rile him up. In general: Unless the new Avengers still have Dr Strange, Star-Lord, and/or Captain Marvel (I think Brie Larson did an excellent job with the character though apparently I'm in the minority) in any significant capacity, I'm not interested. The only ones among the younger replacements who are halfway tolerable are Kamala, (less so) Kate, and Billy, and I mean just that - halfway tolerable. Not someone whose problems and fate I'm truly invested in. I'd also take Loki or Agatha any day.