It’s nothing but accurate to say that Travis Knight’s recent He-Man movie, Masters Of The Universe, failed at the box office. Costing a hefty $170 million to produce, the Nicholas Galitzine-starring would-be epic drew modestly warm reviews, but absolutely cratered financially, earning back barely half of its budget before ultimately tapping out with a $114 million take. But what, dear reader, if this first-act faceplant was just a stepping stone on the Hero’s Journey to true greatness? What if the king, abandoned in the theatrical wilderness, has finally returned to his ancestral home, while also getting (metaphorically) extremely swole?
This is per THR, which reports that Masters Of The Universe has absolutely killed it in its first week on streaming, becoming the most-viewed thing, period, during July 22 window it debuted in on Prime Video. (Ultimately scoring more than a billion minutes of viewing time, handily beating out all other films that week and the potent force of resurgent Big Bang Theory reruns.) And, in some ways, this really does feel like destiny: The film was initially conceived as a streaming project for Netflix, before the company balked when there didn’t seem to be any way to get the budget down. Amazon scooped it up, and opted to give it a theatrical release—but also made some statements about not being too worried about how it did in theaters, describing their approach as “holistic,” and straight-up saying that the movie’s real goal was “building awareness and engagement that will carry well beyond the theatrical window.”
Which seems kind of wild to us—and probably won’t engender warm feelings in the hearts of theater owners, who have not been especially happy about tech companies bringing their more diverse financial interests to bear on the box office. But it does give Knight’s movie a bit of a Jared-Leto’s-skeleton-smashing happy ending. (The director, meanwhile, is headed back to his stop-motion roots; Fathom rolled out the trailer for Knight’s new Laika movie, Wildwood, earlier this week.)
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