Fresh LEGO Disney 2023 rumours include potentially controversial set

Another two LEGO Disney sets are now rumoured to be on the way in 2023, one of which may stoke controversy among the LEGO Ideas community.

According to Instagram user exabrickslegogo_, this year’s LEGO Disney line-up will include Dragon Maleficent – presumably straight from the climax of Sleeping Beauty – and Snow White’s cottage. While those sets are still just rumours for the time being, one of them has the potential to fan the flames of ire among LEGO fans if it turns out to be true.

That’s because a LEGO set based on Snow White’s cottage was originally proposed by Harry Finkel (who goes by hanwasyellowfirst over on LEGO Ideas) in 2021. The model quickly racked up 10,000 votes, progressing to the first 2021 review, but was ultimately rejected by the LEGO Group – which is now seemingly releasing its own Snow White’s cottage a year later.

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The LEGO Group works on its sets years in advance, so it’s not unusual to see an Ideas project turned down because it clashes with products already planned for release. What is unusual is that the LEGO Ideas team initially delayed its decision on Snow White’s cottage to the second 2021 review, claiming it needed more time to properly determine whether to put it into production.

In the end, Finkel’s build wasn’t rejected until February 2022. But if the reason was that the LEGO Disney team already had its own set in the works, would the project not have been turned down straight away in October 2021, when the results of the first 2021 review were announced?

It’s a question that will surely be on the mind of Finkel himself, and especially whether the decision to produce the set was made after his build reached 10,000 votes. That said, there is one potentially obvious explanation: the official LEGO Snow White’s cottage set could well be a smaller and cheaper façade, populated by mini-dolls, while the Ideas build proposed a more detailed and expensive set anchored around minifigures.

It may be that the LEGO Group was weighing up the audience for both directions, and ultimately decided to explore a set targeted towards kids rather than adults. In that scenario, green-lighting Finkel’s model and releasing something entirely different would have been doing a disservice to the builder – not to mention the 10,000 fans who voted for an 18+ Snow White’s cottage set.

With so few other details to go on surrounding Dragon Maleficent and Snow White’s Cottage, it’s impossible to properly judge the situation right now. For the moment, take even the existence of those sets with a pinch of salt until confirmed by the LEGO Group.

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