Every year, LEGO conventions like Brick Con feature builders recreating scenes straight out of movies: a specific shot, a specific set, rebuilt in brick with nothing official behind it. Channels like Beyond the Brick cover this corner of the hobby regularly, interviewing the builders and walking through how they pulled a scene together. None of it is licensed or sold by LEGO. It’s fan work, full stop.
Why this matters if you’re not a builder
I’m not in the business of building MOCs, I’m in the business of reselling official sets, so why does this corner of the hobby matter to me at all? Because it’s a genuinely useful signal. When fans put in dozens of hours recreating a specific movie scene with zero official product behind it, that tells you exactly which franchises and scenes have real staying power in the community, independent of whatever LEGO happens to be selling that year.
If a scene keeps showing up as a MOC subject year after year, that’s a franchise with real fan demand, the kind that makes an official licensed set in the same universe a safer buy. If nobody’s building it, that’s useful information too.
The honest read
I’d treat convention MOC culture as a free research tool. It won’t tell you the exact resale number on a set, but it will tell you where genuine fan enthusiasm is concentrated, and that’s usually a better signal than a marketing push.