‘Masters of the Universe’ Review: Travis Knight’s He-Man Reboot is the Ideal Version of a Movie Made to Sell Toys [B-]

Some film franchises are sustained by merchandise sales tied to the movie. Pixar’s Cars remains a wildly popular toy franchise for children, despite the now decade-long gap between films. And then some movies are made to sustain, or in the case of the new $200 million blockbuster rendition of Masters of the Universe, rejuvenate, a multimedia franchise that existed, from the beginning, to serve as a popular children’s brand. Amazon MGM’s new endeavor — bringing the passé action-figure line-turned-children’s cartoon-turned-critically and commercially disregarded 1980s Dolph Lundgren vehicle back to the screen — walks an uneasy line: restore interest in a property whose commercial vitality has long receded, honor its origins as a franchise aimed mainly at young boys, and satisfy the nostalgia-driven adults who’ve been waiting for a return to the world of He-Man and friends.

Those fans have been waiting for years. Production of a new version has been in development since 2007 and has changed hands repeatedly: Noah Centineo was once set to star; rights passed among Warner Bros., Sony, Netflix, and finally Amazon MGM. John Woo, John Stevenson, Jon M. Chu, David S. Goyer, McG, and Adam and Aaron Nee have all been attached to direct. Directing duties ultimately landed with Travis Knight (Kubo and the Two Strings, Bumblebee), working from the Nee brothers’ script, which was also reworked by Chris Butler and Dave Callaham.

That’s a lot of clashing interests for a single property, but this franchise has long been prone to discordant visions and executive meddling. The world of Masters of the Universe has always been the hodgepodge creation of artists, writers, and Mattel executives constantly compromising with studio brass to make the toys and TV series more suitable for children. Why else do you think He-Man was breaking the fourth wall to offer moral lessons at the end of every episode? But that history also gives the property a malleable quality: it has defining features and characters, while the overarching tone can shift within the boundaries of its dorky sword-and-sorcery trappings to adapt to modern audiences.

With that in mind, Masters of the Universe does what your standard genre-minded tentpole does in 2026: makes everything kind of funny. Here, that’s not a bad thing, though occasionally it can be a minor annoyance. The adventures of He-Man have never been particularly serious, and Knight, for the most part, handles the jokey tone with an able balance between tongue-in-cheek self-awareness and more earnestly dorky moments. In the process, this version of the property lightly subverts some of the antiquated ideas inherent in a franchise built around a blonde, tanned, gorgeously muscular white guy called He-Man running around with a sword to save the day.

The script is an origin story, and luckily, that’s only tedious for the first five minutes. We meet young Adam Glenn (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) as a weakling prince, son of King Randor (James Purefoy) of Castle Greyskull on the planet Eternia. His days training alongside his friend Teela (Eire Farrell) under Royal Guard commander Duncan (Idris Elba) are cut short when the evil Skeletor (Jared Leto) and his second-in-command sorceress Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie) attack the castle. Adam is whisked away to Earth for protection, with only the Sword of Power to guide him home — which he loses almost immediately. We catch up with him years later, now played by Nicholas Galitzine as an adrift young professional in a dull corporate HR job, yearning for the day he can return to his home planet.

These scenes on Earth are played with an amusing sense of irony as we watch the man we know will later be half-naked and fighting monsters try to build a normal 9-to-5 life. It’s playful and brief enough to be a welcome approach. The Earth-bound malaise ends when the Sword of Power is returned to Adam, prompting an older Teela — now played by Camila Mendes — to pull him back to Eternia, now a darkened husk under Skeletor’s iron grip. Reunited with his coterie, Adam must learn to embrace the power the Sword grants him, transforming him into a Herculean warrior capable of taking back his home. 

These disparate elements feed into a broader ambition: the script seeks to interrogate the very ethos of He-Man as a character. Adam’s outsider status on both Earth and Eternia, combined with his lack of fighting experience and a job that prizes conflict resolution over combat, becomes the catalyst for questions about what it means to be a valiant, strong man. He values mediation, but the reality of his home overrun by a tyrannical army forces him to recognize that fighting can also be an act of protection. Modern political interpretations abound — in a cultural climate where right-wing reactionaries peddle regressive definitions of manhood while supporting their own autocratic demagogue, He-Man and his band of diverse misfits defending their home reads as a refreshingly healthy vision of masculinity, one that holds compassion and acceptance alongside the brute strength necessary for the character. 

Between these more intellectual ambitions, Knight has considerable fun with the world and its characters. He and cinematographer Fabian Wagner stage propulsive action sequences — cleanly shot, featuring the kinds of fierce punching, slicing, and beating that had censors in a tizzy over the original cartoon. The production design draws on the pulp fantasy that inspired the toys, from Frank Frazetta’s artwork to Conan the Barbarian; a firefight through a canyon and the analog-tech aesthetic of a Royal Guard base both feel knowingly ripped from Star Wars.

Those sequences generally look good, but the film is at its best on real sets with actors in practical makeup. When relying on CGI backgrounds and characters, the results feel more strained. The worst offender is Battle Cat (Tom Wilton) — despite the enthusiasm fans will have for seeing a character the 1987 film couldn’t render with period technology, a CGI talking animal is still a CGI talking animal. Some of this stuff has a low ceiling.

Elsewhere, the ensemble picks up the slack with everyone being game to look buffoonish or dorky in the earnest high-fantasy nonsense. Galitzine does both, playing the goofy fish-out-of-water and the powerful loincloth-clad warrior with just the right mix of humor and heroism for each. Mendes holds her own as his capable partner, and Elba makes fine comic work as the washed-up, drunken former military commander. The real standout, of all people, is Leto, whose performance is bolstered by voice modulation and effects work, but who nonetheless sells Skeletor’s gleeful, uncomplicated villainy and, in doing so, captures the film’s straightforward engagement with the franchise’s classic good vs. evil dichotomy.

The script has fun with that too: when Adam is convinced there must be more to Skeletor than pure evil, Teela blithely reminds him that he has a skull for a face. That’s Masters of the Universe in a nutshell — it knows the absurdity of its own dynamics, and it does its best to get in on the joke without letting everything go to waste. It’s plainly imperfect: overlong, sometimes too winking, and occasionally flattened by the digitally homogenized look of modern blockbusters. But as a version of the property that bridges demographic and generational gaps to deliver a worthwhile take on a virtually dead franchise, it has at least a little bit of power.

Grade: B-

Amazon MGM Studios will release Masters of the Universe only in theaters on June 5.