Looking over the cast list for next month’s Amazon MGM “Let’s take a bunch of action figures and try to force a movie out of them” action spectacular Masters Of The Universe, it’s not hard to pick out the biggest name. Sure, Nicholas Galitzine has his Netflix and Prime Video fans, and Idris Elba is always a reliable pick for looking stoic while standing near another, more central-to-the-story hero. But Jared Leto (playing bony bad guy Skeletor) has been the biggest name attached to this movie since it was just a gleam in Bumblebee director Travis Knight’s eye back in 2024. Which makes it interesting to note that Leto has been absolutely nowhere in terms of the film’s marketing, leading many (notably industry insiders Puck) to suggest that there’s some pretty serious Leto management/erasure happening with the upcoming film.
Let’s start with a bit of a timeline: Leto was reportedly offered the Skeletor part in late 2024, officially accepting it in December. Filming on Masters ran for basically the whole first half of 2025—which means the movie was just wrapping in June when AirMail published an account from nine women accusing Leto of various forms of sexually inappropriate behavior, many of them allegedly aimed at women under 18. (Leto has denied the allegations against him.) That piece notably did not stop Leto from working the marketing push for Tron: Ares, appearing at the film’s red carpet when it premiered in September of 2025, and doing the junket rounds in support of the movie. Of course, Ares then left a big, smoking hole in Disney’s bottom line for the last part of 2025, bringing in significantly less than its hefty $180-million-plus budget at the box office.
All of which, presumably factors into why there’s been very little Leto in Masters‘ publicity tour, including trailers that show his CGI-covered appearance as the film’s big bad, but seem to go out of their way to minimize his voice, or anything else recognizably Leto-esque. More pointedly, Leto was the only major cast member to be absent from all of the film’s big promotional events, including ComicCon, CinemaCon, and its premiere in Los Angeles earlier this week. Someone at the studio pretty clearly decided that a lead actor who’s both been accused of sexual misconduct and had the last four or so genre blockbuster attempts he made underperform might not be the key to theatrical domination, and, honestly, it’s kind of hard to fault them. Puck News reports that the actor’s absence has been at Amazon’s request, and that Leto isn’t wild about either the silence or the film—but, at $5 million for a paycheck, he’s apparently complying; a quick scan of his social media accounts shows that they’re pretty much exclusive 30 Seconds To Mars at the moment, with nary a glimpse of a bony, sneering visage.
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