The best thing about the Star Wars sequels isn’t the movies: it’s the LEGO

The LEGO Group finally returned to the Star Wars sequels in 2025, and one year on 75415 Kylo Ren Helmet is a great reminder of the best thing about that trilogy – and it isn’t the movies…

You could say – if you were so inclined – that the real legacy of Star Wars as a whole is the vast merchandising machine that’s followed it around since before A New Hope even hit cinema screens. But it’s with some irony that said machinery has all but wound down for Episodes VII, VIII and IX, because the toys were arguably the best things about those films, as capably demonstrated by 75415 Kylo Ren Helmet.

A late addition to the LEGO Star Wars Helmet Collection, which returned after a brief hiatus in 2024, Ben Solo’s headgear was probably the most obvious gap in the line-up as far as main characters go. But given the LEGO Group’s (and Lucasfilm’s) general reluctance to touch the sequel trilogy – you don’t need me to tell you why – there was never any guarantee it would materialise.

That made its very existence a pleasant surprise, and better yet was the execution. Like 75304 Darth Vader Helmet before it – and what an appropriate parallel to draw – 75415 Kylo Ren Helmet has more studs on show than most entries in this collection, but even if you’re vehemently anti-studs in your LEGO you’ve got to admire the LEGO Star Wars team’s consistency across this entire range.

What’s less consistent between these helmets is the use of printed elements and stickers. Some entries – like 75408 Jango Fett Helmet, which debuted alongside Kylo in 2025 – fall victim to an overreliance on stickers, and one mistake in application can destroy the entire aesthetic of your relatively expensive new LEGO set. Or, you know, just lead to a tiny misalignment that you personally will never be able to unsee.

I’m exaggerating for most of these helmets, of course, but there was real potential for 75415 Kylo Ren Helmet to live and die on how neatly you lined up the stickers across the front of the helmet. So it’s with real relief that every decorated element in this set is printed, completely removing the margin for error.

The flipside is that you’re paying a premium for those pieces: this is the second-smallest of all the LEGO Star Wars helmets by piece count, but comes in at the same price as 75408 Jango Fett Helmet. Price-per-piece is obviously not the be-all and end-all of LEGO value metrics, and to be fair Kylo and Jango’s helmets come in at roughly the same size given they’re built to the same scale. But putting together 100 fewer elements means Kylo’s helmet comes together a lot quicker than Jango’s, and it’s tough to say where your £60 has just gone.

With the benefit of hindsight, the value proposition of 75415 Kylo Ren Helmet looks even worse: 11373 The Lord of the Rings: Sauron’s Helmet has shown us what these sets could look like with minifigures included, and the answer is ‘only £5 more expensive’ (which is probably accounted for with inflation alone). A Kylo Ren minifigure here would have really sweetened the deal, especially given his Force Awakens helmet hasn’t shown up in a set since 2016’s 75139 Battle on Takodana.

I’m getting into the weeds a bit here, so let’s take a step back for a second. Forget the price tag; forget the absence of a minifigure – for what it is and what it intends to be, there’s very little to criticise in 75415 Kylo Ren Helmet. It’s a fun build even with the mass of black pieces, and the finished model communicates the character of Kylo Ren in exactly the same way as the movies. Somehow you always know just what its baddies are thinking or feeling underneath their unchanging masks…

And in its way, perhaps in part because we get so few of them these days, 75415 Kylo Ren Helmet almost becomes synecdoche for the wider sequel trilogy collection. Here is a character that very few Star Wars fans (in the grand scheme of things) likely care to remember, yet it makes for one of the better LEGO Star Wars sets in recent years.

So too did the sequel trilogy bring us some of the better LEGO Star Wars sets of its time, in an era when the designers were really just perfecting and finetuning their techniques and approaches to bring us some of the best and most detailed playsets around.

This was a time before downscaling and downsizing, when the LEGO Group was content to let budgets run amok so that you ended up paying £90 for an X-wing, but believe me when I say what an X-wing. Poe’s three Resistance models are still perhaps the definitive examples of what a LEGO X-wing can be. The First Order TIE Fighter set the gold standard for the original trilogy icon, Kylo Ren’s TIE Silencer is an elegant addition to the arsenal and Episode IX’s Millennium Falcon was the first to successfully close the gaps in its hull panels.

The minifigures in these sets may not set your world alight like prequel or original trilogy characters, the colour schemes may irritate your purist Empire vs. Rebels heart, and you’d be hard-pressed to say that many of the sets felt like fair value even when released. (Again: £90 for an X-wing.) But the sequels’ reduxes of those classic trilogy ships came along at exactly the right time, when the LEGO Star Wars team had the tools to go above and beyond previous renditions.

You might have rankled at seeing X-wings and TIE Fighters back on the big screen, but their LEGO sets, detached from that reaction, are undeniably impressive – and many of their improvements big and small have found their way into the design language of other sets since (sets that may more directly interest you).

If timing was on this trilogy’s side in some ways, it’s also worth considering how the LEGO Star Wars landscape has changed since 2019, and where it might fit into the picture today had the movies been better received.

75415 Kylo Ren Helmet and to a lesser extent 75406 Kylo Ren’s Command Shuttle point to what might have been, because in the wake of the LEGO Group chasing down the adult market and splintering the LEGO Star Wars portfolio there would surely have been scope for the sequels to become regular contenders in the various collections of the past few years (helmets, midi-scale ships, dioramas, the UCS and MBS ranges, and so on). But we’d have left behind the same detailed, elaborate and almost indulgent X-wings and TIE Fighters, so, swings and roundabouts.

I suppose it’s worth pre-empting the inevitable comments here too by acknowledging that, yes, there were some stinkers in the sequel trilogy line-up. 75284 Knights of Ren Transport Ship will be transporting precisely nobody (I wonder what life would be like if it had an interior), the first crack at Kylo Ren’s Shuttle was a bit of a disaster (concept art be damned, and at least a better version came along eventually) and the less said about the headless AT-ST the better (there’s really no defending that one).

But for every misfire, there was something equally interesting. The playsets were genuinely fun – 75200 Ahch-To Island Training, 75216 Snoke’s Throne Room and 75180 Rathtar Escape spring to mind – and in some ways quite old-school in their approach, while the battle packs, promotional minifigures and polybags were regularly decent and occasionally genuinely great (red-armed Threepio went above and beyond for LEGO Star Wars detailing in 2015, for instance).

The true legacy of The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker is not particularly the movies themselves, the stories they crafted or even the characters they created. For LEGO Star Wars fans, it’s the sets they inspired – whether as a whole or only in part. 75415 Kylo Ren Helmet is only the latest to come along and remind us of that, and in that way earns its place in not only the LEGO Star Wars Helmet Collection but the wider portfolio, too.

Fair warning, though: it’s currently scheduled to retire at the end of 2026. This year’s May the 4th weekend, one year on from release, could be the ideal time to pick it up…

The copy of 75415 Kylo Ren Helmet featured here was provided for the purposes of this feature by the LEGO Group, but all insights and opinions expressed are Brick Fanatics’ alone.

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