Benchmarks: LEGO Movie Themes – Potter, Jones, and Pirates

This the eighth entry in a series of blogs that analyses some of the data we have available here on Brickpicker to provide some simple averages to use as benchmarks.  I have done the Star Wars, Ninjago, LOTR/Hobbit, City, Super heroes, Technic, and Friends themes and this time it’s a triple header!  I’m going to put three retired popular movie based themes up at the same time – Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, and Pirates of the Caribbean.

My aim is to provide some basic stats for the theme mainly around averages for a few simple measures relating to set sizes and value for money metrics.  I’m going to leave out investment return measures such as CAGR and the various ROI time periods we have available as I think they should be a different discussion and the fact that current retail sets often muddy the results when looking at theme wide averages.

This information should prove useful in writing other blog articles or set reviews.  It also should serve as a benchmark to be able to compare a set against the averages for its theme, which may or may not be useful but the option is there.  Over time as I hope to complete more of these blog posts we might also be able to compare themes against each other.  

Basic Information

I have gathered data on 84 sets from Brickpicker set pages across the three themes.   I’m only going to look at US based information in regards to retail price etc.

Of the 84 there are 53 Harry Potter (HP) sets, 17 Indiana Jones (IJ) sets, and 14 Pirates of the Caribbean (PotC) sets.

I can also tell you that of the 84 sets 7 of them had no listed retail price (promotional giveaways).  So we need to exclude those from some of the later measures that require a retail price to be present. 2 for HP, 1 for IJ, and 4 for PotC.  

Pieces

The average piece counts per set are 322 pieces for HP, 353 for IJ, and 303 for PotC. 

Retail Price

For the sets with a retail price the averages are $35.58 for HP, $37.55 for IJ, and $48.69 for PotC.  Interestingly the PotC theme has the lowest average piece count but conversely the highest average price. 

Price Per Piece (PPP)

Whether you like using PPP as a measure of value for money or not I have included it here as it has become quite a common metric for people to use.  Personally I don’t put much stock in it and find it quite a blunt tool.  The averages are $0.119 for HP, $0.106 for IJ, and $0.158 for PotC per piece.  Carrying through from the above metrics we can see PotC is well above the other two themes

Price Per Gram (PPG)

PPG is in my opinion a better indicator of retail value for money.  It takes into account the amount of raw ABS plastic material you get in the box and should be a closer approximation to the cost of production of the set. The average PPG measures are $0.058 for HP, $0.056 for IJ, and $0.044 for PotC.  This is a turnaround for the PotC results – what it most likely shows is that the PotC sets contained a far larger proportion of big Lego pieces compared to the other two themes.  This makes sense intuitively as PotC has a few ships with larger hull and other pieces.

Minifigure Count

Only 2 HP sets and 1 PotC set do not have a at least one minifigure.  The average minifigures per set are 3.56 for HP, 4.41 for IJ, and 3.57 for PotC.  All fairly high results, showing that minifigures played a large role in the marketing of these sets.

Another interesting piece of information is that of you pay an average of $9.98 per minifigure at retail price for HP, $8.51 for IJ, and $13.63 for PotC.   Thanks for reading and I hope you find a use for some of these numbers either in your own writing or your own investment decision making.