A lot went down in LEGO town in 2025, so from botched launches and graphical errors to record-breaking sets and a $40,000 minifigure, here are the 15 biggest news stories of the year…
Our recap of 2025 in LEGO has so far encompassed the year’s best sets and minifigures, false rumours, biggest surprises, innovative building techniques and much more besides. Now it’s time to chart the most captivating news stories and headlines of the year; the talking points that had us gathering around the (virtual) watercooler for reasons good and bad.
Check them all out below, and don’t forget to keep abreast of our 2025 in review page for more musings and reflections on the past 12 months in LEGO.
15 – The first 3D-printed piece in a LEGO set
The LEGO Group has been testing out 3D-printed elements for a little while, but they’ve mostly been very hard to come by. Not so in 2025, as the first official 3D-printed LEGO piece found its way into 10361 Holiday Express Train, serving up a tiny locomotive with big functionality. Fans were divided on its implementation and purpose – ‘I think it’s a bad precedent’, said one – but the LEGO Group says there’s more to come nonetheless.
14 – Pick a Brick going on hiatus in North America
Pour one out for LEGO fans in the US and Canada who had to find other ways to build their brick collections for much of 2025, after the LEGO Group halted its Standard Pick a Brick service in North America. While that was seemingly a result of Trump’s tariffs, so perhaps not entirely on the LEGO Group, the end result for builders was that they had to make do with the pieces they had.
Still, it’s back up and running now – and just in time for the flurry of new parts from the August 2025 releases. Silver linings.
13 – The Wolfpack Beastmaster craze
Just when we’d all finally recovered from trying to find Dragonborn Paladins in 71047 Dungeons & Dragons, the LEGO Group dropped a brand new Castle-themed minifigure in 71048 Series 27. The Wolfpack Beastmaster was easily the most difficult character to find in the blind-boxed series (even with Brick Search’s scanner in hand), as army builders snapped them up in their droves.
It was little surprise too, because this is easily one of the best LEGO minifigures of 2025 all-round. From the brand new torso and leg prints to the snarling face and wolf accessory, there was a lot going on in that box for only £3.49. Fingers crossed you managed to find as many as you wanted while they were still on shelves…
12 – Mattel coming for LEGO’s crown
It won’t be news to you to hear that the LEGO Group still dominated the construction toy market in 2025, but challengers are starting to gain ground – and hoping to lead the pack is Mattel, which this year announced a new ‘Mattel Brick Shop’ product portfolio with two aims in mind. The first is to target adult consumers, and the second is to tackle particular pain points around LEGO sets, including their prices.
The range so far has consisted entirely of cars at different scales, but with licences including DC and KPop Demon Hunters reportedly on the table for 2026 and beyond, it’ll be interesting to see what else Mattel cooks up to rival the LEGO Group going forward. Watch this space…
11 – A Shire misfire
Sorry in advance if reading this causes the red mist to descend, but… remember the launch of this year’s flagship Middle-earth set? Of all the new LEGO set debuts in 2025, few were as plagued by issues as 10354 The Lord of the Rings: The Shire. While it was supposed to go live at midnight on April 2 (along with its exclusive gift-with-purchase 40761 The Lord of the Rings: Sméagol and Déagol), early adopters found that LEGO.com wouldn’t actually let them order this year’s follow-up to Rivendell and Barad-dûr.
That drive to buy day one, minute one is of course partly a reflection of the LEGO Group’s increasing number of set-specific gifts-with-purchase – and how quickly last year’s Middle-earth freebie 40693 The Lord of the Rings: Fell Beast, released alongside 10333 The Lord of the Rings: Barad-dûr, sold out. Nobody who wanted Sméagol and Déagol was going to risk missing out this time, but first they had to do battle with LEGO.com’s servers…
10 – The licence we never thought possible
A bunch of new IPs joined or returned to the LEGO fold in 2025 – One Piece, Pirates of the Caribbean, Star Trek, Bluey and more – but it’s the one officially announced for 2026 that caught us most by surprise. Pokémon has been under the purview of MEGA for years now, but the LEGO Group has plucked the rights to the video game juggernaut from its industry rival and will be launching a brand new range of sets in 2026.
LEGO Pokémon is currently rumoured to be kicking off with a giant $650 model of the three Gen 1 starters, alongside standalone Pikachu and Eevee builds. Those are slated for a late February release at the moment, so we hopefully don’t have too long to wait to see them for ourselves (if those rumours are indeed true).
9 – A rumoured record-breaking set…
This one’s technically related to a rumoured 2026 set, but the news first dropped in 2025 and it’s already managed to become one of our most-read stories of the year. A record-breaking LEGO set is reportedly on the way next year under the Architecture banner, weighing in at an eye-watering 12,000 pieces (or thereabouts). The current record holder for the most pieces in a single set is 31203 World Map at 11,695 elements.
There’s no word yet on what this mysterious LEGO Architecture set could be, but we’ve come up with a few possibilities…
8 – Star Trek’s two sticker slip-ups
While Pokémon was the most surprising licence announcement of 2025, Star Trek was a close second – but 10356 USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D’s arrival on Black Friday was tempered slightly by a typo on one of its hidden stickers, which proclaimed that the ship would ‘boldy go where no one has gone before’ (rather than ‘boldly’).
The good news? The LEGO Group has already issued a fix. The bad news? The replacement sticker has its own suite of errors. You couldn’t make it up. Still, third time’s the charm… right?
7 – BrickLink figuring out the crowdfunding process…
While early series of the BrickLink Designer Program were defined by their most popular sets (read: castles) selling out in minutes, the LEGO Group came up with a solution in 2025: dynamic production allocation. That means the BrickLink team can adjust production numbers for each crowdfunded set on the fly, so they can reallocate copies from the least popular sets to the most popular in real time.
The result was that all of Series 5 and 6’s finalists were available to pre-order for the entire crowdfunding window, giving everyone a fair shot at getting the sets they were after. We’ll hopefully see the same process continue for Series 7 and beyond in 2026…
6 – …but announcing closures in 35 countries
Not everything was rosy for BrickLink in 2025, though. The platform is currently facing heavy criticism for the community after quietly announcing the secondary marketplace would cease operations in 35 countries this month. After some initial pushback, the platform – which is owned by the LEGO Group – extended the shutdown until January 2026, but it’s still left thousands of buyers and sellers in the lurch.
5 – More LEGO Star Wars controversy
They say that nobody complains about Star Wars as much as Star Wars fans, and you can probably carry that right through to LEGO Star Wars, too. Perhaps the year’s second-biggest news story from a galaxy far, far away (keep reading for the biggest) was the furore surrounding 75413 Republic Juggernaut, which the community tore apart for not only its eye-watering price but also its seeming instability.
That set was really only a symptom of the wider problem facing LEGO Star Wars this summer though, with a wave defined by ballooning prices – let’s not forget the
4 – The $40,000 Peter Jackson minifigure
Rare LEGO minifigures come and go, but few sell for as much as Peter Jackson. One of just 20 minifigures of the director ever produced, this particular example was auctioned off by former LEGO designer Marcos Bessa (who left the company at the beginning of 2025) – and was quickly snapped up by Samuel Burkhardt, known on Instagram as rarest_lego_minifigures, to the tune of $38,028.
“I am very excited to add another piece of LEGO history to my collection,” Samuel told Brick Fanatics at the time. “The minifigures that are made in small quantities and only internally circulated between board members/high ranking designers are some of my favourites, both for their rarity and ingenuity as a minifigure design. Peter Jackson definitely takes a special place in my collection for multiple reasons.”
3 – LEGO being accused of downplaying D&I
The LEGO Group came under fire back in April for reportedly removing terms related to diversity and inclusion from its annual report, which one Danish journalist suggested was an attempt to keep ‘in line with the Trump administration’. Trump issued an executive order in January to halt governmental diversity and inclusion initiatives, and reportedly demanded that businesses in Europe that supplied the US should follow suit.
A closer look at the LEGO Group’s sustainability reports from 2023 and 2024 does indeed show a marked change in language use, with terms including ‘LGBTQ’, ‘woman’ and ‘diversity’ – which were all present in the 2023 report – completely scrubbed from the 2024 document. The LEGO Group responded by saying it was ‘fully committed’ to its diversity and inclusion initiatives. You can dig a little deeper into this story here.
2 – A surprising partnership
One of the most surprising news stories of the year came earlier this month, when the LEGO Group announced it was partnering with FIFA for a range of sets hooked to the 2026 World Cup. If you’re not caught up on the long, long list of reasons why FIFA is perhaps not the best partner for the LEGO Group – at least given the values the Danish company claims to uphold – give this a read.
1 – The $1,000 Death Star
We’ve deliberately stayed away from set reveals in this list because otherwise it would be full of them, but 75419 Death Star transcends the status of a mere reveal. The first $1,000 LEGO set was a news story that defined 2025 from beginning to end; from the moment it was first rumoured (all the way back at the tail end of 2024) to the various updates that trickled out through the year – and, finally, the completely unexpected direction in which the LEGO Star Wars team took the finished product.
The backlash from some corners of the community was intense, and even while the set has its fans, it’s hard to deny that regardless of the design direction or execution the price is just too high for what’s in the box. The 9,036-piece set retails for a staggering £899.99 / $999.99 / €999.99, and it’s hard to imagine what else could top it. But then we said that about the UCS Millennium Falcon and AT-AT, so…
Don’t forget to check out more of our 2025 recaps here.
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