Shaun of the Dead LEGO denied

"The Winchester" by YATKUU

I woke up this morning to see a post from LEGO CUUSOO showing they are rejecting the Winchester project. I admit that I'm a little disappointed in the decision, but I totally understand why they had to do this. Shaun of the Dead is not exactly appropriate for many audiences and producing a set based on the movie is a pretty big risk. LEGO is primarily marketed at kids, after all, and gory zombie movies with scenes centered around a bar are not exactly the things you would associate with the company.

I know many out there are saying that 10,000 fans supported this and it should be made. However, I think many of those people are failing to understand
exactly how this hit the required 10k votes for CUUSOO review. It was only after Simon Pegg was on Conan that the project picked up the steam necessary to get the votes. One would have to assume that a lot of people, many of which are not AFOLs, went looking for the project to support it. Pegg is pretty active on twitter as well, so it would not surprise me if he started steering fans towards the site as well. You can see the clip below where he discussed the project, starting after about the three minute mark.

Bottom line is, LEGO probably realized that many of the people who voted for the project probably would not end up buying it. Casual fans are going to move on to the next thing when they see the $150 price tag something like this would require. That's based on the current modular pricing, even though I imagine the price would have been higher because of the licensing and limited production run that would be necessary to make this happen.

CUUSOO projects so far have not been widely released. I don't see the upcoming Minecraft project coming to stores. So far, there's just one place you can preorder it online. I don't think either of the Japanese projects have been released in the US either. The point is, the audience to market this is limited, and getting the word out when the model is produced would be difficult.

From a business perspective, I just see this concept being a disaster for LEGO. While I would love to have this set, I can totally understand why it can't be made by TLG. They reviewed the concept at 10k votes, as promised. That review just showed them this can't be done.

It is also worth noting that the Shaun of the Dead project has triggered changes at CUUSOO. A blog post at the end of last month showed they will take steps in the future to prevent impossible projects from reaching the review stage. This is probably for the best. While CUUSOO is intended to help create projects LEGO might not normally pursue, the company still needs to protect its brand and reject projects that are too far away from the core audience of the product.