LEGO 7965 Millenium Falcon - Is it an Investor's 10179 remake?

The Millennium Falcon is one of the most iconic ships in the Star Wars movies and it is personally one of my favorite ships. Unfortunately, I cannot afford to buy the 10179 (yet...) so I was ecstatic when they produced a large play-set model to sustain my Star Wars fantasies until I can get the big one.

I have been storing this set for a while, so I was really excited to get one out and build away. And what better way to display that than to take pictures of the set and do some investment analysis? I have 5 more of these, so I hope the build and research works out well so I am inline to make money on my investment.

First up, the box. I generally have not liked the newer Star Wars boxes and, while this one is decent, I don't see anything about it that screams “Buy Me!”. It is fairly large which is enticing, but other than that it is just a picture of the set with some small pictures in the back ground. On the other hand, the Falcon doesn't really need a lot of fanfare – it brings its own.

The largest set I have built to date is 9516 Jabba's Palace which is slightly over 800 pieces. When I opened this box, this set just felt huge:

How big are these 5K piece sets??? As I was starting to sort through the bags, it really threw me off. I figured there would be 10-15 bags. I was confused very quickly to see that there were several bags that had the same number on them:

Like I said, I have never built a set this big so maybe this is normal. This meant I had to open them all at the same time and pour them into a pile ( I can't stand not having pieces available). Unfortunately, this makes it a lot harder to try and find some of the smaller pieces. After pouring out the 3 bag 1's, there are 300-400 pieces on my carpet.

First, we get to go through the minifigures though. There are no unique minifigures in this set, but I did not have a Darth Vader yet so I was really excited about him. I really liked how they did his head in gray. I guess I should have expected it, but it was surprising to see since all the minifigure heads are pretty close to the same until you attach their hair-hats.

Put on his helmet and I swore I heard the Imperial March in the background.

Chewy is up next. I really like the figure, but I have 3 or 4 of these already so it was a little boring. I feel like at some point they could do him a little differently.

Han is next. His outfit is the same from several other sets, but I really love the smirk. I think they had to of been looking at an actual picture of that Harrison Ford smirk.

Leah is next with her white garb and hair buns. Again looking at pretty much the same minifigure from other set. The Leah in the Jabba's Palace was a lot more fun.

Obi Wan is the next minifigure. He is another main character I only have one of. The hat and cape are done really well. The face gives off the old, but wise look as well:

Last, but definitely not least is Luke. He is a duel outfit minifigure. You have your normal everyday Luke:

And then your training Luke:

On to the tremendous amount of pieces sitting in front of me. The bottom part is the base of the ship and holds up pretty well. It is mostly bigger flat pieces held together by 2X4s and 2X8s. There is a slot for an escape hatch as well as spot for a walkway to get up the ship. Nothing crazy exciting in the first bag, but nothing too repetitive either.

You can see form the bottom of the ship the hatches and how the bottom is patched up. I was impressed how well the base of it stayed together.

Moving on to bag 2 and we have a lot more fun pieces. This is filling out the inside of the set with all the little toys and gadgets for the characters to use inside the Falcon. There is the control board with two seats. You also have the chess-like round table game that they were playing in the movie with seats around it. There are also several other little sets, tubes and boxes around the set to really add a lot of detail. Since this is supposed to be a play set, these are key to the set's success. Kids want to have easy ways to use their imagination. I enjoyed this bad quite a bit because of all the little unique pieces:

Here is a picture of the console:

Bag 3 is the opposite. It is very repetitive and tedious. In this section you are creating the back and mid-sides of the ship that are between the base and the dome-like top of the ship. The build is not necessarily bad, but since it is round, you create the same 2X6 block of pieces in slightly different ways until you have enough to go all around the ship. The problem with this is that they are all just a little different. With repetitive builds, I like being able to make 4 or 5 of the same thing at the same time to save page turning, etc. Unfortunately, all of these were different so they had to be done one at a time:

And now we add the booster on the back of the ship:

May not look as good as 10179, but it isn't a $300 lattice piece right? One weird little thing a ran into was a couple of pages in the book still connected together. It is pretty late at night while I am putting so I won't lie about the fact that I may have spent 5 minutes trying to figure out if there was some secret way to open up a centerfold or something.

The next bag was another accessory and touch-up bag. You added onto the side of the ship where the small cabin is on one side. It also included solidifying the middle section of the ship for all of the outside dome pieces to connect to.

It also included putting on the ship entrance walk-way on the bottom and the guns. They look pretty cool and spin around. There are also feet so that it doesn't sit directly on the ground:

Second to last bag and it's a big one. This one is a lot like bag 3 with the repetitive builds. This includes all the dome pieces separately. There are a couple of places where you could build parts a the same time so it wasn't quite as bad. I was surprised, but there is no way to actually connect these pieces together. I knew the ship itself opened, but I thought there would be a way to really close it up. It looked good, but as you can tell from the picture, it was hard to get all the pieces to fit down flush. As a display piece for me, I would have liked it just a little bit cleaner.

You can also see the satellite and the other set of turrets on the top:

The last bag is very small. It is the front wedge pieces for the ship along with the side cabin for Han. It was about the size of a normal smaller set's bag, so it was a good switch up from the huge amount of pieces all the other bags had.

The set itself is really impressive. Even though it has 4.5 times less pieces than the UCS model, it is still huge! It barely fits on my shelf that is a foot deep. I really think the detail is great. Sometimes a set being a play-set is better for display because you have a lot of extras.

I will say I noticed that some of the parts popped off pretty easily. Inside where you are really supposed to play with the set and minifigures, the set is really solid. However, if you try to fly it around (not that I did that), it is really easy to knock some of the smaller pieces off.

Still a very impressive and pleasing set and a good build. I have no doubt it will continue to be a very popular set and will be an investment winner (as we will discuss below):

It's investment time! This set should be really easy for us to make a good prediction on. There are two pieces of this set's potential that I can see as relevant: How have the UCS remake play-sets done? And How have the other Falcons done? The one thing to pay attention to is: with the other falcons, is there anything close enough to make this seem like a non-unique remake?

Quickly, by UCS play-set I mean a set that is a slight remake of an older UCS set but it is much smaller and includes more extra parts for playing along with more minifigures.

So what sets match this?

Well, I don't want to rehash too much widely available information, so I would suggest that if you haven't checked out FCBarcelona101's article on UCS Play-sets, do it now:

http://www.brickpicker.com/forum/index.php/blog/4/entry-227-star-wars-ucs-playset-edition/

I want to pull two sets from that article that I think best compare to this set. This is the 10198 Tantive 4 and the 6211 Star Destroyer:

10198: 9.59% CAGR
6211: 17.17% CAGR

None of those sets blew their original UCS set out of the water, but they were both pretty solid and seem to still be steadily growing thought hey have both been retired for several years. Looking at the two, I think the Falcon best compares to 6211 because the 10030 Star Destroyer is really expensive so people buy the smaller one and I think the same thing will happen with this set. When people have a good alternative to a $2500 set, that is a good thing for the smaller set's growth.

Now, how have the other Millennium falcons done?

7190: 663 pieces, $99 retail, 6.89% CAGR, 137% ROI
4504: 985 pieces, $99 retail, 1.63% CAGR, 15% ROI
10179: 5195 pieces, $499.99 retail, 31.81% CAGR, 422% ROI
7778: 356 pieces, $39.99 retail, 16.34% CAGR, 83% ROI
 

Besides 4504, our data looks pretty good. 7190's CAGR is only about 7%, but it has been around almost 15 years, so that it expected. 4504 does scare me though. Looking at it, it is not a lot different from this set. It has the sections that open and the little play-set area inside. It had 5 minifigures that were pretty normal characters as well.The 7965 has a little bit on it with a few extra minifigures and having a more sleek design. It is also about 300 pieces bigger. This is still fairly problematic, though, and a reason why I wouldn't go crazy on this set.

I think in the end it will experience solid gain. This set has been really popular while it has been out and should retire at the end of the year. I would guess a safe CAGR would be 12.5% after 5 years. That would put this set at $252.28 and give everyone a nice solid gain. I would definitely recommend avoiding this set at retail, but picking it up at the $105-$110 range will be very solid and should allow you to double your money at that 5 year mark (3ish years after retirement).

All in all though, the set is great and I would definitely recommend building it if you can. It is a really nice, large display piece and a good sub-in if you don't have the UCS set. Don't expect this set to put up the same numbers as the 10179, but I wouldn't bet on it to lose. Note: All of the information here are my own opinions and are pulled from my experiences. You may or may not have success with these methods. Thanks for reading!