Why LEGO’s New Death Star Set Has Caused a Great Disturbance in the Force
Mescad, watching the LEGO Subreddit daily, agrees, describing “the disgruntled fan,” who has “pored over every screenshot, video review, and catalog photo for months learning every detail about a massive set. And [if] LEGO omitted a tiny detail, they’re angry. They are angry about the set. They are angry about the price. They are even more angry that you aren’t angry and may be considering buying the set. Some of this is legitimate, but far more often, those fans were never planning to buy the massive set anyway, and they are just looking for an excuse to feel better about missing out.“
Yet amid all the guessing and mock-ups, one design assumption held constant: the Death Star would look like the Death Star. Previous LEGO versions of the iconic space station diverged on design intention: the 2005 set is a scale model with no play features, no minifigures, and no interior, while the 2008 Death Star (and its updated 2016 version) was more like a playset, stocked with minifigures and interior environments based on iconic movie scenes. The 2016 Death Star, an open-faced diorama, topped out at about 4000 pieces, and so given that 2025’s upcoming behemoth was twice the price and more than twice the size, fans assumed that what loomed must be a perfect marriage of scale accuracy and interior wonder.
LEGO YouTuber Ryan McCullough, who runs the wildly popular MandRproductions channel, stated in April that “everything is pointing towards a big-panel Death Star with a full-on interior,” and that “it’s starting to feel like it could be an absolutely killer Death Star set. And I certainly hope so, because you can’t put a thousand dollar set out and have it be bad…”
The hype cycle was unlimited fun until July, when a new, devastating, confounding, and utterly diabolical detail emerged in the leak ecosystem: it was not going to be a sphere. The thousand-dollar Death Star, in fact, did not look like the Death Star.
“The last thing any good designer wants to do is let down the customer. We want to deliver the best possible experience,” Brosius told me. Full disclosure: Jake and I were once coworkers at the pet company BARK, where we had the pleasure of working on Star Wars–branded dog toys together. “Having to work on Lucasfilm products,” he reminds me, “there are so many factors that come into play. Cost, creative, and outside opinion all drive the product more than we’d like but that’s the job we fill. You can’t always get things exactly perfect, but you can work within constraints and optimize your solution to suit the challenges.” According to the internet, LEGO’s Star Wars team, in not making the set spherical, had dropped the ball completely.
Not unlike the producers and distributors of films and records, LEGO relies on pre-release reviews as part of their marketing plans, which means sending sets to influential builders in the LEGO Ambassador Network. This early access, plus the arrival of sets and set imagery in retail stores, allows for the final stage of leaks. A month or two after the “not a sphere” rumors began to trickle across fandom, actual images of the UCS Death Star’s box leaked on or around August 9. The design of the set was as many now feared: Instead of delivering a massive planet-shaped Death Star, LEGO had created a design that looked more like an open dollhouse, with about a dozen famous scenes from the film recreated in an assembly fans were calling the Death Slice, the Pancake of Death, or the Death Diorama. The hype cycle for the controversial set was concluding somehow with both a bang and a whimper.
