• The Mini Bust Collection is a new Marvel subtheme from LEGO.
• The collection begins with Iron Man and Spider-Man.
• This seems to be an evolution of LEGO’s helmet range.

LEGO has announced a new subtheme inside of the Marvel theme known as the “Mini Bust Collection” which, exactly as the name suggests, gives customers buildable busts of famous superheroes.

The company has kicked the subtheme off with the reveal of two new sets: the MK4 Iron Man armour and the Iron Spider-Man. The announcement mentions that the Iron Man bust is based on Iron Man 2 but doesn’t mention a specific movie (or even comic) for the inspiration of Spider-Man.

Each bust includes a black stand, a nameplate and a minifigure, giving you a figure version of the character you just built as a bust. These two also have some limited articulation that allows you to change how they look with airbrake flaps on Iron Man being movable and the gold robot spider likes on Spider-Man having some articulation. It also seems that the two have some movement in their heads.

“We’re so excited to unveil these new busts. It only felt right that the first bust would be one of the most beloved Avengers, Iron Man, and with their close relationship, Spider-Man in his Iron Spider suit is the one to follow – completing an ultimate world-saving duo. We hope that all fans of Marvel will be able to feel the love and attention we gave these LEGO sets and that the details and building techniques will surprise and delight our fans around the globe,” says Petra Persson, designer at the LEGO Group.

At this point, we have to mention that LEGO has already tried this idea before. Kind of. For Star Wars, Marvel and DC, LEGO has been making the Helmet Collection since around 2020. This subtheme gave as many scaled-down helmet/mask sets that, while not wearable by humans, still offered a way to have famous pieces of character costumes on our shelves.

Both Iron Man and Spider-Man have received helmet sets before in 76165 and 76285, respectively. While the Iron Man helmet has long since been retired, the Spider-Man one launched in 2024 and is still available.

The Helmet Collection has always been a hit-or-miss subtheme for LEGO. The designs varied wildly in terms of how accurate they were, and the high pricing attached to all of them made each a hard sell. Unlike the new Bust Collection, the helmets also didn’t come with minifigures, making their value seem even worse.

Only time will tell if the new busts will be a better take on things, but public reception has been quite poor. While people seem to like the Spider-Man one overall, the face of Iron Man looks a bit weird. We can’t help but picture that scene from The Simpsons where a character eats a lemon.

The pricing revealed in the announcement is another sore point, with LEGO asking for quite a lot of money for not a lot of pieces, which you can see in the table below. Oddly, the Spider-Man bust is the same price as Iron Man while having far fewer pieces, though it does seem like Spidey has more printed pieces.

Only time will tell if the busts prove more successful than the helmets and if the market is willing to pay full price here or if waiting for discounts is the way to go. It will also be interesting to see if the older helmets will continue to exist alongside the busts.