Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) is an adult male of indeterminate age with self-made drawings of swords and superpowered soldiers wallpapering his bedroom. He’s not an aspiring artist or even a surprisingly handsome comics fan, but a genuine prince from the planet of Eternia; you might expect his drawings to represent suppressed memories of his Eternian childhood, but no, he fully remembers these details with perfect clarity and loves them all because they’re unambiguously real, not idle fantasies. It’s around the clarification of this point that more discerning members of the audience for Masters Of The Universe—those above the age of 12 but below a generous nostalgia cut-off of 35, with no applications needed from anyone north of 55—might wonder if the movie is coddling its most dedicated potential fans.
The filmmakers, led by Nike scion and Laika president Travis Knight, would likely prefer you to think that they’re having an affectionate laugh. The DreamWorks-like opening voiceover from Adam, with its cutesy little asides about the silly name for the Sword Of Power, is designed to reassure the audience that this Mattel-produced enterprise isn’t completely humorless in its dedication to this toy-based lore—while nonetheless dedicating a substantial effort to recreating it. This kind of respectful joshing, which continues throughout the less-narrated portions of the movie, can be difficult to pull off. The best-case scenario for this is the gaming-based Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, where most of the light irreverence arises from the characters and situations, providing some extra cushioning even when every joke doesn’t land. The new Masters Of The Universe does not represent the best-case scenario, though if the bar truly is the ’87 version, consider it cleared with room to spare.
The protracted opening shows Adam as a shrimpy youngster, failing to excel at self-defense under the tutelage of Duncan (Idris Elba), as his father King Randor (James Purefoy) looks on disapprovingly. When the evil, skull-faced wizard Skeletor (Jared Leto) busts into the kingdom, the Sorceress (Morena Baccarin) sends Adam and the Sword Of Power through a magical portal to Earth, protecting Adam from the attack and the sword from Skeletor’s clutches. Adam loses the sword in the portal, and he grows up yearning to return to his original home—which would surely wound the feelings of his adoptive family if the movie bothered explaining who, if anyone, they might be. The even-further-protracted section on Earth, where Adam works at a humdrum human resources position while obsessing over his lost sword, is not especially convincing, as pathos or as comedy. (Here’s an uncommonly expressed sentiment: Thor: Love & Thunder did it better.)
When Adam finally finds his sword and returns to an embattled Eternia with the help of his now-grown childhood friend Teela (Camila Mendes), the pair goes on a haphazard quest to overthrow Skeletor. They’re accompanied by a disgraced Duncan (who is also Teela’s father), a robot, and, more briefly, a giant green tiger whose screentime appears limited by the visual effects budget. Once permanently relocated to Eternia with adult characters, Masters Of The Universe remains on firmer ground for the balance of its bloated 141-minute runtime, even if those grounds change somewhat arbitrarily. The frequent abrupt location shifts make some of the action scenes feel rootless and the epic questing seem, well, pretty easy.
The trickier business is figuring out how, exactly, to write or play Adam/He-Man. Is he supposed to be sweetly dumb? A fixated dreamer? An earnest idealist? A send-up, a celebration, or something in between? The blandly likable Galitzine appears to be waiting to be told where to go. It’s all in the mix as the four-writer screenplay attempts to take stock of modern masculinity; finally, a good-looking white guy wondering how to go about being a hero-man! The movie somehow concludes that Adam serves as a beacon for empathy, which has all the conviction of the corporate seminars that the movie briefly attempts to satirize. The important thing is that both Adam and Teela contend with their respective daddy issues, the only kind of issues the movie rates at all. A scene where Adam reunites with his mother after decades apart yields almost nothing; they barely exchange more than a sentence or two for the entire movie, leaving her thoughts on empathy, or any other matters, politely unspoken. Similarly, Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie), Skeletor’s sorceress accomplice, spends a lot of time appearing to keep her feelings to herself. (Earlier descriptions of Brie’s role suggest that drastic cuts were made.)
Given that this is all based on a particularly grab-baggy Saturday morning cartoon reverse-engineered from a toy line, the fact that Masters Of The Universe bears even a passing resemblance to superhero pictures like the Thor series or James Wan’s Aquaman might count as a win. The fights in particular are shot in pure camera-pivoting Wan-o-vision, and the color scheme mixing brightly autumnal tones with streaks of pinks and purples makes the movie’s overreaching, CG-heavy effects explosion look almost like a visual style. Skeletor is particularly fun to look at. His character design from the old cartoon could probably make the best case for the overapplied status of “iconic,” and the movie’s glow-up gives him red pin-prick eyeballs with a permanent lens-flare effect. Supposedly it’s Jared Leto somewhere in there, but the body looks like pure CG and the mincing British ghoul voice emanating from that evil-grinning skull sounds nothing like him. Did Leto secretly subcontract out in a desperate bid to be designated the best part of a movie for the first time in his life? Whatever happened, his total lack of appearance in the movie is a step in the right direction.
Skeletor, high spirits, and the sheer volume of references to the old TV series (even in joke form) are signs that Knight and his crew do love this material—and with a sincerity the movie wants credit for without really justifying. They’ve simply made another likable kids’ movie secretly aimed at sentimental nostalgists; there’s not a 10-minute stretch of this project as well-written or well-designed as almost anything in the Netflix series She-Ra And The Princesses Of Power. She-Ra, of course, gets punted to a potential sequel here, and after that show, it’s hard to imagine that character getting her due in this universe. That She-Ra felt something like a person; whether the subject of jokes or seriousness, Masters Of The Universe is toys all the way down.
Director: Travis Knight
Writers: Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, David Callaham
Starring: Nicholas Galitzine, Camila Mendes, Idris Elba, Jared Leto, Alison Brie
Release Date: June 5, 2026
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