Overview
What music goes best with turning eight-million Lego bricks into the largest collection of life-sized Lego Star Wars models ever assembled? 'Luke's Theme', aka the franchise's main tune? 'The Imperial March' when things get tricky? 'Parade of the Ewoks', just because? That's a question for Ryan McNaught aka Brickman, who has been spending time turning plastic rectangles, squares and other shapes into a recreation of a galaxy far, far away.
The end result: Lego Star Wars: The Exhibition, which is a world-first showcase of Lego models based on the George Lucas-created space saga. It'll arrive in Australia in 2025, making its global premiere — and it sparks another question for attendees: which tracks will pair well with walking through this Lego Star Wars wonderland?
The force is strong with this one — the Lego-building force, that is. Exactly where all of those millions of Lego bricks will display hasn't been revealed as yet, and neither have exact exhibition dates, but you can start getting as excited as a Skywalker learning how to first use a lightsaber.
The full list of models that'll feature also hasn't been unveiled so far, but battle scenes between Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader will be on display, plus Qui-Gon Jinn and Darth Maul duelling, and also Emperor Palpatine's throne flanked by two Royal Guards. If you're in Melbourne and Sydney, you can also get a sneak peek right now — with the first two at Westfield Doncaster from Wednesday, May 1–Monday, May 6, and the third at Sydney Arcade's huge Lego store (the world's largest, in fact) for the month of May.
As it constructs an immersive experience and follows in the footsteps of the Jurassic World franchise, which has also scored the Lego treatment from Brickman, Star Wars: The Exhibition has plenty of material to draw upon. On-screen, the series spans the initial film trilogy that released from 1977–83, then the prequels from 1999–2005, then the sequels — including The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker — from 2015–2019. Rogue One, Solo, The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, Ahsoka: the list goes on across the big and small screens. There's also TV's The Acolyte, which arrives in June 2024, plus the wealth of animated efforts in the saga.
"Building real people and characters is one of the hardest things you can possibly make out of Lego bricks. Each model not only has to represent who it is in incredible detail, but also needs to capture the moment, the emotion, the struggle, the tension," said McNaught about Lego Star Wars: The Exhibition.
"Translating those epic scenes, iconic characters and spacecraft from Star Wars into little bricks is really hard and that's why they are rarely done, and even more so on this scale. Nobody has ever recreated these fight scenes at this scale out of Lego before — and I'm excited to be able to help premiere this in Australia for the first time in 2025."
Lego Star Wars: The Exhibition will hit Australia in 2025, with when and where still to be revealed — we'll let you know more when it is announced. Head to the exhibition's website to sign up for updates in the interim.