Right now, four Studio Ghibli concepts remain in play inside the LEGO Ideas review process. No Ghibli pitch has ever gotten this far, and it comes after years of submissions that led nowhere.
A quick primer, for anyone who hasn’t fallen into this particular rabbit hole. LEGO maintains a whole product line sourced from community concepts. Upload your custom build to the LEGO Ideas website, gather enough backers, and the set advances to review with a genuine chance of ending up on shelves.
The Ghibli pitch keeps coming back
Ghibli-themed builds have been landing on the platform for years. Not one has ever been selected for release by LEGO. Then again, the door has never been shut either.
May brought the announcement of the first 2026 batch of LEGO Ideas to formally enter review. Between that group and the leftovers carried over from last year, four Ghibli sets remain in the running to become the franchise’s first official LEGO build.
Why good ideas die anyway
What decides these things isn’t popularity. Any LEGO Idea can stall for a long list of reasons, and once a concept is bolted to an existing IP, licensing is usually what kills it.
Consider what fills the shelves. Star Wars, Marvel and Disney sets all arrive at LEGO via official licensing with The Walt Disney Company. Ghibli isn’t set up like that. Anything drawn from the Studio Ghibli movies would require sign-off from the studio itself.
That’s the wall. Were LEGO able to run a deal through an established partner such as Disney, Nintendo, Warner Bros. or Netflix, one of the many submissions filed over the years would almost certainly be on sale already. None of this makes a deal impossible. It simply involves more hoops than, say, an X-Files set.
The 40th anniversary angle
Having four builds survive review simultaneously is an encouraging signal that an official set may be coming. Nor is this the first Ghibli concept to get this far — that honor belongs to a Spirited Away build that cleared review earlier.
The difference this time around: two of the MOCs still standing are connected to the 40th Anniversary.