Nexo Knights has died just short of completing its three year run, which brings up the question of possible replacements.
Seeing as Nexo Knights was a quasi-castle theme, its unlikely that a new castle theme be made, and while I am a die-hard Space fan, I don’t think any original Lego Space fan can compete with Star Wars.
Mech themes and castle to an extent are already fulfilled by Ninjago, what with the Ninjago movie, and some of the temples can be considered somewhat as castle. Secret agents/spies could be an option, but I don’t know how well Ultra Agents performed. Pirates seems unlikely mainly because of the poor single year runs previously. Underground mining theme might be an option, Power Miners was pretty popular, but still didn’t last the typical three years.
So what do you think will rise out of the ashes of Nexo Knights?
The problem is that a lot of classic Lego lines haven’t survived; things like the last castle line, pirates line, agents line, etc.
Thus I think they’ll probably try and do something pretty new, although my personal hope is that they can make a fantasy castle line with a true story; I feel that the story is essential when it comes to maintaining a line. This is one of the reasons why Bionicle G2 failed; the story was super simplified and not readily available to kids. This is why Ninjago sells so well; kids don’t want the sets for the vehicles themselves, they want the vehicle because it is Jay’s vehicle, or Kai’s vehicle, or Zane’s vehicle, etc. and it contains their favorite character.
I think part of the draw to the story as well is the theme slowly maturing; think about Bionicle G1; it started out rather simple, but as time went on it got a little darker, to the point where a main character died! It’s fine to start off simple, but if it doesn’t get any deeper than that your group is going to age out and the new kids won’t be as into it since they didn’t start with it.
I hope they do an underground mining theme. I really liked power miners. They might also do some kind of underwater adventure theme. Like Atlantis or aqua raiders. It seems though like they’ve usually tried to have some kind of castle theme going every year so they might do that again
A slow maturing story based theme would be ideal, but from a producer point of view it is costly to start. I can’t speak for Lego, but I would imagine that it is a big risk to heavily invest into theme, getting writers to create a story, promotional TV series, online games, ads. And even if they do all that, a series might fall short, like Nexo Knights.
About the successful story plot Lego creates, I once pointed out before that:
I would love a new constraction theme that goes by the name of Voloctoreb. Though, in all seriousness, I want a full on constraction and system collision. Not constraction with a couple playsets or a system theme with some buildable action figures (Chima,) but a full on combination. With, of course, elemental heroes.