I never owned Castle Grayskull, Battle Cat or even a loose He-Man figure. That turns out to be a useful place from which to watch Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe: less as a collector checking continuity boxes, more as somebody who remembers what Eternia felt like from the other side of the television.
In the Philippines in the early 1980s, He-Man toys felt like a small map of who had access to what. Nobody I knew would have called it a class signifier — we were children, not sociologists — but you noticed the boy who had Castle Grayskull, the Wind Raider and enough figures to stage an actual war on the living-room floor. I watched the cartoon, knew the characters and absorbed the strange logic of Eternia, but the plastic part of the experience happened somewhere else. Decades later, that distance is probably why I came to the 2026 film with affection rather than ownership. I wanted it to feel like He-Man; I did not need it to preserve every piece of packaging copy from 1983. Spoilers follow.
The Toys I Never Had
He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was built around merchandise, but that never made the cartoon feel disposable to me. Eternia had a visual grammar that was hard to confuse with anything else: barbarian fantasy, ray guns, skull fortresses, robots, sorcery, giant cats and men whose names sounded as though they had been decided five minutes before a Mattel meeting. None of it should have cohered, yet it did. Filmation then layered in Prince Adam’s secret identity, friendships, restraint and those earnest end-of-episode morals, which gave the world a surprisingly decent centre beneath all the oiled torsos.
I was what I would now call a moderate fan. I watched faithfully and knew enough of the mythology to understand who belonged where, but I was never the child memorising weapon specifications or comparing figure variants. I had no shelf of evidence. What stayed with me instead was the atmosphere: the green face of Grayskull, Skeletor’s cackle, the transformation ritual and the cheerful refusal to choose between science fiction and sword-and-sorcery. That is the version of He-Man I carried into adulthood, slightly hazy around the edges but very specific in tone.
A Universe Built From Plastic
Mattel launched the original Masters of the Universe line in 1982, and Filmation’s animated series followed in 1983. Mattel’s own retrospective describes the early range as a fantasy-and-science-fiction hybrid, which is a neat corporate phrase for the magnificent lack of restraint that made the thing memorable: muscular barbarians could share shelf space with cyborgs, monsters, vehicles and a green tiger wearing armour, and nobody had to explain the genre rules. The minicomics and packaging helped sketch in the lore, but the cartoon made that world emotionally legible to millions of children. Mattel dates the original line to 1982–1988 and the Filmation series to 1983.
That matters because every modern attempt to revive He-Man has to decide whether the original absurdity is a problem to solve. It is tempting to sand off the bright colours, lower the voices, dim the lights and reassure adults that they are watching something serious. The better answer is to recognise that sincerity and ridiculousness were never opposites here. The original He-Man could stand in front of Castle Grayskull in a fur loincloth, deliver a moral about thinking before acting and somehow mean both things at once.
Seventeen Years in the Wrong Hands
The strange thing is not that Hollywood wanted another Masters of the Universe film. The strange thing is how long it took Hollywood to stop almost making one. The modern version of the project had been moving around studios and filmmakers since at least the late 2000s, accumulating directors, writers and prospective He-Men while never quite becoming a film. Jon M. Chu, McG and David S. Goyer were among the names attached at different stages; later the Nee brothers developed a version that moved from Sony to Netflix, with Noah Centineo and then Kyle Allen attached to star.
Netflix finally abandoned its version in 2023 after considerable development spending. TheWrap reported that Netflix had already spent about US$30 million in pre-production before the film migrated again, this time to Amazon MGM. By then the project had the smell of one of those properties everybody in Hollywood knew how to announce but nobody knew how to finish. Travis Knight’s useful decision was apparently not to treat all that abandoned work as sacred archaeological material. He told TheWrap that he deliberately avoided most of the earlier material and approached the property on its own terms.
That is visible in the finished film. It does not feel like seventeen years of executive notes compressed into two hours. There are compromises and some obvious blockbuster machinery, but the tone is unusually coherent for something that spent so long being passed from hand to hand. It knows that Eternia has to look tactile and oversized, that the humour cannot be embarrassed by the source, and that the hero needs to be more interesting than his biceps.
Travis Knight Gets the Assignment
Knight is an unusually sensible choice for this material. His years at LAIKA are all over his instincts: worlds feel designed rather than merely rendered, objects have weight, and even the stranger details are presented as though somebody had to build them before the camera arrived. Kubo and the Two Strings showed his command of myth and handmade spectacle; Bumblebee showed that he could take a large 1980s toy property, remove some of the industrial noise and find a surprisingly gentle emotional centre inside it.
He applies the same trick here without simply repeating Bumblebee. This Masters of the Universe is not trying to prove that He-Man was secretly dark and adult all along. It treats the world seriously without treating seriousness as a colour grade. Castle Grayskull can still be a giant skull. Battle Cat can still be green. Skeletor can still be called Skeletor. The film’s confidence comes from refusing to apologise for those things, which sounds obvious until you remember how many adaptations spend half their running time winking at the audience for caring.
A Prince Who Hasn’t Earned the Pose Yet
The film’s most useful change is making Adam somebody who has spent fifteen years away from Eternia. Amazon’s official synopsis describes the Sword of Power leading him home after that separation, where he finds the planet under Skeletor’s rule and has to reconnect with Teela and Duncan/Man-At-Arms. On Earth, Adam has grown into a gentle, slightly odd human-resources worker who still talks about Eternia as though everybody else should know what he means. The joke works because the film lets the displacement hurt a little before it becomes funny.
Nicholas Galitzine is better at this than the promotional stills suggested. He has the necessary physical presence, but his Adam is most appealing before he knows what to do with it. He tries to negotiate, over-explain and de-escalate; he is emotionally closer to the boy who lost his home than the poster-ready warrior everybody expects him to become. There is a touch of Big in the mismatch between the body and the uncertainty, and Galitzine understands that the character becomes likeable by being slightly out of step with his own mythology.
The transformation therefore lands because it is not simply the moment in which a handsome man acquires more muscles. It is Adam accepting responsibility for a place he remembers imperfectly and a role he has spent most of his life unable to reach. The film occasionally makes him too passive — Teela and Duncan do a lot of the competent work while Adam catches up — but I preferred that to starting with a hero who already knows how to pose. He-Man has always been more interesting when strength is treated as a responsibility rather than a personality.
Skeletor, Finally Allowed to Be Skeletor
Jared Leto was the casting choice that made me most cautious, mostly because Skeletor can go wrong in two opposite directions. Play him too straight and the character becomes a generic dark warlord wearing an unusually inconvenient face. Push too hard towards parody and he becomes a sketch waiting for a punchline. Leto and Knight land somewhere much more useful: theatrical, vain, threatening and clearly delighted by his own villainy.
The performance is maximalist without becoming detached from the film around it. The skull, hood, staff and voice all announce a man who has never once considered the possibility of underplaying a room, and that suits Eternia. Frank Langella’s Skeletor in the 1987 film had a stern, almost Shakespearean gravity; Leto’s version has a different kind of pleasure, closer to the flamboyant menace I remember from the cartoon without attempting an imitation. He can be genuinely nasty and very funny within the same scene, which is a difficult balance and probably the strongest argument the film makes for leaving camp intact rather than curing it.
The Company He Keeps
Camila Mendes gives Teela the film’s most stable centre. She is the person who already knows how this world works, which leaves her carrying both the action and a fair amount of Adam’s emotional re-entry into it. Their chemistry is warmer than the usual blockbuster shorthand for “future romantic interest”; there is enough shared childhood history in the performances to make the relationship feel older than the film. Idris Elba, meanwhile, is almost suspiciously comfortable as Duncan. He brings authority without making Man-At-Arms a humourless mentor, and the character’s relationship with Teela gives the story some welcome familial weight.
Alison Brie’s Evil-Lyn is the supporting character I wanted more of. Her Earth material, including the way she inserts herself into Adam’s ordinary life, has a slightly uncanny texture that promises more complexity than the later Eternian scenes quite deliver. Brie remains watchable once Evil-Lyn moves into full sorceress mode, but the screenplay increasingly uses her as a component of Skeletor’s machinery when she briefly seemed capable of becoming something stranger. Kristen Wiig’s dry Roboto is used sparingly enough to work, while Battle Cat benefits from the radical creative decision to let a giant armoured tiger simply be cool.
Dolph Lundgren’s cameo is also handled with the right amount of restraint. The 1987 film has lived a long afterlife as a cult object, and the new film acknowledges that history without turning the whole sequence into a museum tour. It is a nod rather than a demand for applause, which is usually the healthier way to handle legacy casting.
The Right Kind of Ridiculous
There is a useful distinction between a film laughing with old material and laughing at it. The first says, yes, this is wonderfully strange and we know why you love it. The second keeps glancing at the audience to make sure everyone understands that the filmmakers are too sophisticated to believe in the thing they were paid to adapt. Masters of the Universe mostly stays on the first side of that line. It can joke about Adam’s HR language colliding with a sword-and-sorcery civilisation without suggesting that kindness, restraint or moral clarity are themselves jokes.
That is closer to the Filmation show than the surface nostalgia might suggest. Those episodes were never shy about telling children what they thought decent behaviour looked like. Knight updates the delivery rather than removing the impulse. Some of the social commentary is blunt, and a few jokes arrive with the grace of a Ram-Man entrance, but the underlying idea is consistent: being the most powerful man in the universe is less interesting than deciding what power is for.
A Score With No Indoor Voice
Daniel Pemberton’s score understands the assignment in roughly the same way Skeletor understands interior decorating: restraint is not the point. It is large, melodic and comfortable pushing the fantasy towards rock-operatic excess. Brian May’s guitar work fits into that world so naturally that it seems obvious in retrospect; May himself credited Pemberton with the music and teased that there was considerably more guitar in the film than the early promotional material revealed. His own site confirms the Pemberton/May collaboration.
The music matters because this is a film that could easily have been sonically flattened into generic blockbuster urgency. Instead it gets a score that behaves as though Eternia deserves its own mythology. When the film leans into Queen-sized grandeur, it does not feel like a cynical 1980s cue dropped in to make the middle-aged audience point at the screen. It feels of a piece with the production’s larger decision to make excess part of the language rather than something that needs quotation marks around it.
Coming Home, More or Less
The film is not tidy enough for me to pretend nostalgia solved everything. The middle stretches, particularly when Adam is still being moved around by more capable characters, could use more urgency. Evil-Lyn deserves a fuller arc. At 132 minutes, there are places where the screenplay seems to be carrying traces of the many earlier versions that came before it. The critical response was divided for understandable reasons: what feels to me like affectionate silliness will look to somebody else like expensive franchise cosplay.
The theatrical numbers also put a slightly awkward shadow over all the talk of a new cinematic universe. The Numbers lists a US$170 million production budget and a worldwide theatrical gross of about US$113.8 million, which is not the equation a film of this size wants before marketing and distribution costs enter the room. That is not the whole commercial life of a modern studio film — it subsequently moved to Prime Video, where Amazon says it is now streaming globally — but it makes the film’s future less simple than an end-credit tease.
None of that changes the odd pleasure I got from finally seeing Eternia treated as a place rather than a branding problem. I never owned Castle Grayskull. I never had Battle Cat waiting under a Christmas tree. My relationship with He-Man was built from weekday television, half-remembered episodes and the sense that other children had access to a more physical version of that world. Forty-odd years later, the film gives me two hours inside it, and perhaps that is why its imperfections do not bother me as much as they probably should.
What Knight gets right is not continuity for its own sake but the old contradiction at the centre of He-Man: enormous muscles and an essentially gentle idea of heroism; skull-faced villains and cheerful moral certainty; swords, lasers and a green tiger sharing the same frame without anybody clearing their throat. The movie can be ungainly, overlong and financially precarious and still understand that. For somebody who watched from the cheap seats of a 1980s childhood, that feels less like reclaiming a toy I missed and more like finally being allowed into the room where everybody had been playing.
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