Yesterday, the LEGO community received massive news regarding two major themes, courtesy of a leak from BrickTap. While the first wave of leaks caught the attention of LEGO Star Wars fans, the second target was LEGO DC.
If you haven’t seen the news yet, the January DC wave is rumored to consist of just two sets, and both of them are Batmobiles. Set 67008 is a Batman Returns version, while set 67009 is the Arkham Knight Batmobile. We don’t have any visuals yet, but frankly, the news is a bit disappointing.
According to Brickset data, LEGO has pumped out 17 playscale Batmobiles over the past five years. Now, a high volume wouldn’t be a bad thing if they were offering the same variety and scale we see in LEGO Star Wars, but they aren’t. Instead, it feels like half of every single DC wave is just another variant of the Caped Crusader’s car.
Community reactions
It has gotten so bad that the community response under the leaked Reddit thread is pure exhaustion. One Redditor commented, “At this point, people would like it if they made those stupid mechs with the superheroes in them.” Anyone familiar with the LEGO community knows just how desperate that sentiment is, considering how notoriously disliked the superhero mech sets usually are.
Another user joked, “The DC subseries just needs to be renamed to Batmobiles at this point. Not even Batman. Just Batmobiles.” Dozens of other comments echo that exact same frustration.
So, what should LEGO do to fix this?
If I were in charge of the theme right now, I would look directly at the new LEGO Batman game for inspiration. The standout feature of that game is its open-world free roam, which offers incredible potential for physical sets. LEGO could easily design a set based on the interior of Shreck’s department store, or even a detailed Gotham train station.
Introducing location-based building sets would bring much-needed diversity to the lineup. It would also solve the ongoing issue of recycling the exact same DC minifigures; just by utilizing these two game locations, LEGO could give us fresh, generic Gotham Goons to build up our criminal armies.
At the very least, LEGO needs to stop featuring multiple Batmobiles in a single wave. To be clear, their designs are nearly always fantastic, but even great designs suffer from overexposure. Spacing them out to just one release a year would make the repetition far less glaring, and fans wouldn’t be nearly as frustrated.
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