Is Mandalorian LEGO for teenagers a mistake?

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Hello there, brick fanatics. First off, this is very, very important. This video is not meant as a criticism of these two new Lego Star Wars sets. I'm not saying that they look bad. I can foreseeably see myself picking up one, if not both of these sets sometime down the line.

[00:00:14]What I am wondering though is whether anyone at the LEGO Group is looking at these two newlyannounced sets, looking at the box office for The Mandalorian and Grou, looking at the viewing figures for these LEGO sets target audience and wondering to themselves, we made a bit of a mistake with this one. Lego Star Wars 75454 Imperial Remnant 8080 with int 4 contains,453 pieces, has a price tag to match, and is aimed at a 10 plus audience. It will release on the 1st of August 2026.

[00:00:44]Similarly, 75453 Offworld Sand Crawler and Mudhorn contains 1,683 pieces, has a standard LEGO Star Wars 2026 price tag to match and releases on the 1st of August 2026, and is aimed for a 14 plus audience. These two sets then are going out to older kids and teenagers particularly. They are very focused around play as well as being nicel looking display pieces. A decision has been made here to make these sets for teenagers rather than sets for adults.

[00:01:13]Otherwise, they would have the 18 plus box branding. The LEGO Group is normally very careful when it comes to making a Lego set aimed at teenagers. They know that some adults will buy it, but ultimately a lot of the time it makes more sense to make a Lego set 18 plus and then expect younger people to go up rather than making older people come down. If you look at these two sets, especially that AT80, which has a bunch of different Imperial troops in here, they look very similar to some of the large Clone Wars or prequel sets that we've been getting in recent years with a bunch of different clone troopers.

[00:01:44]Things like the ATTE, the MT, the Republic Juggernaut. These are sets which sell very well to a target audience of Clone Wars fans who are teenagers and older. And you can definitely see the LEGO group's attempt at doing something similar for The Mandalorian and Grou, the new film that is released. One of these sets is based on that film. The other is based on the first season of the Mandalorian TV show where in the Mandalorian and his at the time enemy, although he didn't know he was his enemy, fight a Mudhorn. However, first off, these sets are late by a couple of months. They are not releasing until August, which means they're going to miss the time period during which The Mandalorian and Grou is in cinemas.

[00:02:20]Instead, these sets will be for people who watch the film on Disney Plus and say, "Yeah, all right. I'll drop like 200 quid on one of these sets." That's not the biggest deal in the world if people are really excited by the film.

[00:02:32]The problem is, and I get that you personally watching this video absolutely loved the film. I get that. I can't comment on the film one way or the other because I haven't seen it. But the problem is a lot of people who otherwise like Lego Star Wars haven't seen The Mandalorian and Grou. The film is doing not particularly well at the box office.

[00:02:52]It has had the lowest opening weekend of any liveaction Star Wars film. The only Star Wars film to perform worse at the box office during its opening weekend was The Clone Wars, which suggests that the problem here really is Stinky the Hut. And there's various different reasons for why this film might be underperforming, but I think a large part of the reason is a lot of the target audience have just kind of gotten bored of this. They did one good season.

[00:03:18]They did one season that relied quite heavily on spectacle. They did one season where it felt very much like everybody was phoning it in. They had a bit of a break for a while and now they've done a film which is, as I've said in several videos, very clearly a glorified Disney Plus show. Now, you don't need me to give you basic insight into how Disney has perhaps not prepared Star Wars for long-term success in the way that they could have done. There are a billion other videos on YouTube that will go into great detail about that, and many of them will be a lot angrier than this video, which is, you know, quite fun to watch. But from the LEGO side of things, it's been clear for a while now that The Mandalorian has been a very strong performer group when it comes to licensed Star Wars sets. That's why we keep getting these things because they keep selling.

[00:04:02]And so going into a Mandalorian and Grou film in cinemas with a big marketing push, the LEGO group was probably thinking to themselves, this is an easy win. The problem is how they have designed these two sets, specifically that audience that they are aiming at.

[00:04:17]If we go back to looking at the Neielson viewing figures for Star Wars on Disney Plus that we spoke about in a previous Lego Star Wars video, we know exactly which demographics are the most excited about The Mandalorian. More excited about that than any other Disney Plus show. The people who are gravitating towards The Mandalorian more than any other Disney Plus Star Wars show are Gen Alpha, ages 2 to 13, and Baby Boomers, ages 62 to 80. And if you look at the majority of new Mandalorian sets that have released this year, they hit that target demographic exactly right. You've got a bunch of different sets which are aimed at younger Star Wars fans, kids that are just really excited to get hold of Grou in some form or other. And then by virtue of the fact that these sets are going to be popular with young kids, they're also going to be popular with grandparents who are most likely to be buying them for young kids. So an older person may walk into a store, see an adorable little brick-uilt grou, and say, "Yes, that's perfect. That's exactly what my granddaughter wants."

[00:05:10]The problem though is what happens when you hit teenage years with Gen Zed, ages 14 to 29, being significantly more interested in the Clone Wars than The Mandalorian. This is the target audience for those big Clone Wars sets that I mentioned previously. They do very, very well for this particular audience. They often have some kind of cool vehicle involved, but they've also got a lot of different minifigures. And of course, not all recent LEGO sets that look like this are specifically Clone Wars related. We get a nice healthy mix of different types of sets. normally a fair few built around the original trilogy because that just keeps generating money and so it makes complete logical sense for the LEGO group to try this kind of thing with a new Star Wars film finally hitting cinemas. The problem is yet again not everybody has watched it yet.

[00:05:52]A lot of people are waiting until it is on Disney Plus and as such it is really not generating as much buzz as a Star Wars film might have done maybe 10 years ago. It does feel very apt to compare this to the Clone Wars cartoon film because both of them fill a similar niche in that it's kind of content that really should be on the small screen that has been elevated to the big screen just for the sake of generating some ticket sales. Where the Clone Wars has ultimately won out here though is in terms of that long-term plan and the fact that it wasn't just one film that it then went on to launch an incredibly popular cartoon series that has basically continued to this day in some form if you're willing to count all of the various different spin-offs.

[00:06:29]Meanwhile, the trajectory of The Mandalorian seems to be kind of going the opposite way. It was very strong from the start, and now that we finally got a film, it isn't wowing people quite as much as it could do. And again, I've mentioned this before, I'm going to say it again. If you enjoy the film, I'm not saying that you are wrong for enjoying the film. I'm just saying that Disney is really struggling to get bums in seats for this particular showing. Now, there is a massive difference between what people will pay to see in cinemas and what Lego sets they will purchase based on the thing that they have seen. So, it could be that these sets proved quite popular, even if people didn't go to see The Mandalorian and Grou in cinemas the absolute first possible second that they could. The point is simply that maybe this kind of Lego set isn't as much of a shorefire hit as it might have been 10 years ago. I can see this as honestly quite a fair response to the fact that the Lego Star Wars audience is getting older year and it's becoming more difficult to draw in new Lego Star Wars fans. Unfortunately, the thing that would have done that better than anything else would have been a brand new Star Wars film in cinemas that is designed specifically to connect with younger fans. And we got that and it hasn't worked. Maybe we will we will wait and see. This is a lot of speculation about how things play out long term, but certainly at the moment it doesn't look like The Mandalorian and Grou is going to galvanize an entire new generation of Star Wars fans the way that maybe Disney was hoping it would.

[00:07:46]And so I come back to the thesis statement for this particular video that maybe the LEGO group banking on teenagers to really really connect with the Mandalorian and Grou and want to spend a significant amount of money on Lego sets based on that rather than on Clone Wars sets. Maybe that was a mistake. But that is just my point of view. What are your thoughts on the matter? Do let us know down in the comments and do all of the rest of the YouTube things. This video is over now.

[00:08:13]Thank you very much for watching.