In Travis Knight we trust.
Yes, he’s a billionaire nepo baby, but he’s still the president and CEO of Laika. Which means that he’s near-singlehandedly responsible for keeping stop-motion animation alive, with sweet home Portland as its capitol city. It also means that he’s produced (and directed, in a few cases) some of the greatest animated instant classics made in the past few decades. And lest we forget, Knight also directed Bumblebee, which doesn’t get nearly enough credit as the best live-action Transformers film we’ve seen thus far. Hell, it’s currently the best film adaptation of a Hasbro property by a damn sight.
Which brings us to Mattel, perhaps the world’s most iconic toy company that isn’t Hasbro. They adapted Barbie into a film, with end results that took the world by storm and effectively captured the female demographic. And just like Mattel did in the ’80s, they’re bringing in He-Man and the Masters of the Universe to try and duplicate that success with the male demographic.
To be entirely honest, I never understood the appeal of this franchise. Until “MovieBob” Chipman — a dyed-in-the-wool Gen-Xer who grew up with the property — helpfully explained that He-Man was always intended to be Barbie for boys. Just as Barbie was built to be anything and everything that fits within the narrow-minded fantasy of stereotypical young girls (homemakers, beauty queens, etc.), He-Man was built to be anything and everything that fits within the narrow-minded fantasy of stereotypical young boys (sci-fi superheroes, high-fantasy warriors, etc.).
Of course, this doesn’t completely assure me that the franchise needs to be revived. The first movie bombed so badly that it helped sink a major Hollywood studio, and that was all the way back in 1987. Numerous attempts have been made over the past 40 years to reboot the franchise in various media, and nothing took. (With the notable exception of the She-Ra animated show on Netflix, but does that really count as a He-Man adaptation?) Hell, this latest film has been in various phases of development for 20 freaking years. Maybe it’s a dated concept we’ve all outgrown.
Then again, pop culture nostalgia still reigns supreme. And it’s a long-established fact that Hollywood can never ever let a franchise die. Most importantly, they gave the film to Travis freaking Knight, a director with a proven (albeit underappreciated) history of making legitimately good movies out of glorified toy commercials for Gen-X kids.
So let’s see what we’ve got with Masters of the Universe (2026), shall we?
Long story short, Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) was born as the prince of a faraway sci-fi/fantasy paradise known as Planet Eternia. When Adam was ten years old (and played by Artie Wilkinson-Hunt), Eternia was invaded and destroyed by Skeletor (Jared Leto, what the fuck are you still doing here?), who was after the mythical Sword of Power. Thus Adam was sent to Earth with the Sword of Power, for the protection of both, but Adam promptly lost the sword. And he’s incapable of getting home without it.
(Side note: In this iteration, it’s clearly stated that Adam’s mother — Queen Marlena, played by Charlotte Riley — was originally from Earth. This helpfully explains why Earth was chosen to be Adam’s safe haven, but I have to wonder if that might be a loose thread for sequels to build on. Time will tell.)
Fifteen years later, Adam is working as a corporate drone in HR. (With Sasheer Zamata making good use of her comedic chops as his middle-manager boss.) Thus he’s been trained and equipped to resolve conflicts through dialogue and anodyne corporate newspeak, rather than violence. Trouble is, he’s a social and professional pariah because he refuses to let go of his childhood. He keeps going on about the magic sword he has to find so he can get back to his home, drawing all these sketches of the heroes he knew from Eternia…
Look, there’s no getting around this — Adam is a fanboy. Yes, the metaphor is a bit muddied, in that Eternia and Adam’s childhood there are genuinely real, no matter how many people try to gaslight him into thinking otherwise because they don’t know better. Even so, in every way that matters, our protagonist is functionally the adult who obsessively holds onto the toys and cartoons he’s adored since childhood (like “Masters of the Universe”, for example), no matter how many grown-ups tell him to let it go and conform. Thus, as the film unspools, the fans in the audience get to vicariously live out their fantasy of becoming their favorite hero and going to the world they’ve always dreamed about. All while the corporate overlords at Mattel implicitly send the message “You were right all along to hold onto that lifelong brand loyalty, now go buy a playset!”
Of course this franchise was only ever a toy commercial, but that’s a whole ‘nother level of insidious. And speaking of which, of course Amazon/MGM couldn’t let a big-budget tentpole flick go by without a scene where an Amazon delivery truck saves the day.
Anyway, the plot kicks into a higher gear when Adam inevitably finds the sword and comes back to restore the franchise Eternia after so many years of destruction and neglect. But of course it can’t be that easy or we wouldn’t have a movie. Man-At-Arms (Idris Elba) used to be the chief of the royal guard, and now he’s a washed-up drunkard. Roboto (voiced by Kristen Wiig) was a top-of-the-line battle droid, and now she’s been recommissioned to be a sassy household appliance. Cringer (voiced by Tom Wilton) doesn’t even show up until the third act. And all the rest of Eternia’s heroes are scattered and leaderless.
Teela (Man-At-Arms’ daughter, played by Camila Mendes) is pretty much the only competent warrior left. And she’s lost all faith and patience in Adam, her father, and everyone else around her. Thus it’s the female lead/love interest who has to get shit done until she can trust her male teammates and/or see that they’ve earned her trust by rising up to her level. It’s a neat take for a female lead in a male-centered property. I dig it.
As for Adam, he’s gone through fifteen years of social pressure to be a nice guy in keeping with modern Earth customs. And the film takes great pains in pointing out that he was always pathetically bad at physical violence to begin with. So now the pressure is on to learn how to be the warrior that Eternia needs. But it’s not that simple.
Time and again, the film keeps coming back to the themes of raw power, physical strength, and when/how to use them. Through the first half of the movie, Adam keeps trying — and miserably failing — to use charm and diplomacy against opponents who have no interest in discussion. Then Adam finally transforms into He-Man, and he depends entirely on brute force with no idea how to use it wisely or safely. And all of this is in stark contrast to Skeletor, a villain so overloaded and addicted on brute strength that he doesn’t want/need/have any degree of intelligence or tact.
I sincerely like and appreciate those moments when Adam learns what power, strength, and masculinity really are. It’s especially powerful when Adam and another character — usually Man-at-Arms, a charismatic and dynamic character like only Idris Elba could deliver — help to teach and elevate each other. And I’d be remiss not to mention Morena Baccarin, who briefly but gamely shows up as our protagonist’s Yoda figure.
The point being, this movie is about standing up to protect someone. Pulling a team together and keeping them together. Avoiding violence when possible and using it when necessary. Sure, these are all standard lessons in superhero fare, but they’re necessary all the same. This is the stuff that makes a glorified toy commercial into something genuinely worth the ticket price and the nine-figure budget. Also, for a franchise that actively encourages kids to shout “I have the power!” it’s responsible good sense for a cinematic adaptation to go into detail about what power actually means.
With all of that said, this is still a Masters of the Universe movie, and pointedly self-aware of that fact at all times. Adam gets his pink shirt. Orko shows up for a quick cameo. Dolph Lundgren gets a speaking cameo. “What’s Up” by 4 Non Blondes gets a needle-drop. “Princes of the Universe” gets a needle-drop, complete with new guitar tracks from Brian May himself. Daniel Pemberton’s score is loaded with musical nods to the original series. And the script nearly trips over its own lampshades, there are so damn many of them.
While most of the self-aware humor works, there’s one prominent and recurring example that doesn’t. See, the supporting characters’ iconically goofy names (“Fisto”, “Mecha-Neck”, “Tri-Klops”, etc.) are shown to be the inventions of a ten-year-old kid who never got to properly meet any of these actual Eternians. Cute idea. But now Adam’s a grown-up, and he actually gets to meet these characters, and they all roll their eyes at these stupid names… without offering their own actual names or saying what else they’d prefer to be called. Also, I can’t reckon how “Ram Man” is a name too stupid to be real in Eternia, yet “Evil-Lyn” is somehow acceptable. It doesn’t work.
Which brings us to the villains. This is where the filmmakers most clearly show that they understood the assignment. While the good guys are pretty much all given some degree of nuance, the bad guys are all only here to chew scenery until they get flattened. Of course Alison Brie is a prominent case in point — it turns out that her remarkable comedic talents make her uniquely qualified to play to the cheap seats and depict the most over-the-top evil sidekick imaginable. Second only to Jared Leto himself.
I’ve said it for years, and I’ll keep on saying it: If we absolutely must keep Jared Leto around — and I want to stress emphatically that keeping him around is a really bad fucking idea — it must be done with the understanding that Leto is a shitheel. He is a monster who is uniquely fun to hate, that is the one and only worthwhile reason to keep him around. And here we have a movie in which the cartoonishly evil villain is played by a literal real-life cartoonishly evil villain, so we don’t have to like him or sympathize with him and we don’t have to see his face. That’s not ideal, but it’s acceptable.
Say what you will about Leto, but he freaking nailed Skeletor. He delivered a villain who’s deliciously over-the-top in a way that’s funny without ever making him any less threatening. He is unrepentantly and irredeemably evil, and he freaking loves being evil. That’s not to say we don’t have any less objectionable actors who could’ve done this — we’ve already seen Jack Black and Jim Carrey do something similar with their respective villain roles in their respective video game adaptations. Hell, Mark Hamill has a recent history voicing Skeletor — he could’ve done the mo-cap/voicework and let the stunt performers do the rest, no problem. Even so, we can only judge the performance we’ve got, and while I hate to admit it, the performance we’ve got is pitch-perfect.
The bottom line here is that Masters of the Universe (2026) worked for the exact same reasons Bumblebee did: The film knows exactly what it is and makes no apology for it. Yes, it’s a glorified toy commercial. Yes, it’s stupid and flashy and juvenile. But the film full-on commits to all those things with such gleeful aplomb that it circles right back around to being fun. Even when the film indulges in umpteen repetitions of the same groaner entendres, I didn’t care because I was having too much fun with the action sequences or getting swept up in Adam’s development into a proper leader. And given how sensational the transformation scenes are — practically daring the audience to join in and shout Prince Adam’s most famous catchphrase — the filmmakers show a clear sense of what really matters.
It’s a film that gently roasts the audience and the established fans without ever directly insulting them. And it’s not like an adaptation of this particular property was going to be much smarter or deeper than what we got. So if you’re looking for an intelligent, funny, thoughtful, exciting summer movie the whole family can enjoy, you should totally see Nicholas Galitzine… in The Sheep Detectives. But the Mattel movie isn’t too bad either.