Cyprinus

They didn't. The Brickheadz was a January release and Rivendell came in March. They made a retail set a gwp, not turned a gwp into a retail set.

If the legs are only for riding Shadowfax, them being unprinted wouldn't be much of an issue.

What would they print on the skirt? I'm kinda sad Gandalf the White has regular legs and not a skirt piece...

Yeah, you can be sure Lego will go after this, and hard. But the video is genuine. And the set marvellous. Wouldn't be too hopeful - previous gwps didn't exactly have much of a connection to their sets.

She also has a unicorn horn pendant. could get a matching wand or something.

We do?

Most likely scenario - leaker/source got told it is a 2026 movie without getting a name and it got delayed later on.

They failed, hard, last time. Why would they do "fine" now?

That time came quite a while ago :P

Rivendell is vastly different from Minas Tirith (or Barad-Dur for that matter) in that the look of the location as a whole is far less iconic than individual scenes playing out there. MT is the exact opposite - all the scenes playing out there are nowhere near as iconic as the city as a whole. Lego definately doesn't want to skip that. And how do you propose an amalgamation of scenes would look like? A scaled down courtyard of the white tree, with some facades in the back and a tiny bit of wall with a gate right below it? Don't think that would look great...

Minas Tirith doesn't exactly have much in the way of interiors that would need to be done though...

Minas Tirith is all but guaranteed to be like Barad-Dur - microscale exterior with some rooms acceessible from the back (the throneroom, maybe a room with the Palantir near the top).

Everything that existed for at least a year, yes. It might not be ones celebrated (since we tend to focus on specific numbers, generally multiplies of 5), but the anniversaries are there.

Makes sense for microscale.

According to leaks, 11370 is Stranger Things.

I guess this means we can't say many people were disappointed with the Death Slice - no proper survey was made. Just comments on various sites, forums and discord servers. The same thing I based my MT comment on.

I don't understand why someone would buy something they don't like (or is flat out shite) just because it has a label. Funnily enough the Death Slice approach wouldn't work for MT - too little happens in its interiors. Which is one of the reasons approaching it like Hogwarts Modular Castle wouldn't work. But to the vast majority of people MT means the whole city, with its unique shape and look. A hobbit hole with some greenery is a much better representation of the Shire (also, if not microscale getting multiple hills with Hobbit holes would be unlikely) than having, say, the courtyard with the white tree and calling that MT.

The issue is that the single most iconic element of Minas Tirith is the shape of the whole city. Barad-Dur, unlike Minas Tirith, basically had no scenes that mattered. Even less so with characters.

I have been saying it every time someone posts that moc - it is the worst of both worlds.

But it is the place you'd expect to find him. And going by the books, he had an almost full body at the time - just missing a finger... I imagine they did enough market research to know that. And it would fit the anecdotal evidence I have ;P That approach works for few things. MT isn't among them.

Or microscale. All levels will never happen otherwise.

Obviously I can't give you exact proof, especially since LotR sets dropped during a period I completely ignored Lego. However several people I know and trust, plus a bunch in various Lego servers forums and so on describe a large chunk of the sets as basically being on permanent clearance and still not selling. And it seems there are definately less of them in circulation than of others sets from the same time period, so that would check out. The Mumakil in the room is that in the case of Rivendell, individual scenes are more iconic than the location itself. Minas Tirith is the complete opposite - the shape of the whole town is the most iconic bit.

The whatever reason was cutting the theme short because it failed to meet expectations. Ultimately most kids don't care about LotR, and for grandparents buying gifts other options will feel safer. The problem with making a properly minifig scale Minas Tirith is that unless it isn't Minas Tirith, but a tiny (compared to the whole thing) bit, it just isn't feasible in any way, shape or form. Though I guess we had precedent for such things this year with "The Shire", but whatever. As for the "pleasing some" thing, the issue is that it also displeases others. And I have a feeling I'd likely be in the latter group...

I'd also argue that the lack of interior scenes for Barad-Dur helped the designers - they may not have anything to go off, but that meant they can do anything, as long as it fits in a dark lord's tower. Whereas Minas Tirith had limited interior sets, they weren't all that interesting, but skipping them will make (some) people riot. To be honest I feel it would be better if they skipped Minas Tirith altogether - no matter what they do, a loooooot of people will be really disappointed. And probably not without a reason... It ain't going to happen. At most we'll get what we had this year and supposedly next - a bigger "location" set and some misc thing to put on a shelf (book nook, bust, dunno what else they'd do, Gandalf's hat? buildable Rings of Power?).

I feel Minas Tirith will disappoint one way or the other. Beyond doing it in architecture scale there really isn't a good way to capture the whole thing, and while in Rivandell they managed to combine select scenes into a glorious display, it also didn't have a shape anyway near as iconic as MT. Meanwhile doing it Barad-Dur style means you don't have a way of doing most of the scenes in the movie (since they're outside), while the interiors you have are kinda meh (the throne room and the pyre of Denethor)...