Nearly 40 years have passed since the colossal financial failure of Cannon Films’ live-action feature “Masters of the Universe” signaled the cultural falloff of Mattel’s successful sci-fi sword-and-sorcery media franchise — which had, for five years, held undiscriminating Eighties kids like this critic in its thrall, before we mostly moved onto other things. But in Mattel media, as in “Masters of the Universe,” no one ever really dies: The denizens of Castle Grayskull have since lived on, in faintly undead form, through sundry comics and toy line revivals and, most recently, a morass of animated Netflix content. And so, with the “maybe this time” mentality that colors much Hollywood studio decision-making these days, we’ve come round to another live-action “Masters of the Universe” feature: bigger in all dimensions, certainly, and better if the unabashed badness of the first one isn’t especially dear to your heart.
Does anyone really need it, though? If a “He-Man” movie was missing from the marketplace in 2026, would you note and mourn its absence? Travis Knight‘s film is so loaded with jokes about its own out-of-time uncoolness that it occasionally seems to be apologizing for its very existence: “Yeah, I know, but that’s what they went with,” says flaxen warrior Adam, on identifying his signature Sword of Power weapon in his introductory voiceover. (Adam, of course, is better remembered as He-Man, though the film shies away from that lame moniker, too, until its closing minutes.) The green-screen effects are knowing in their outright fakery; the nerdiness of the whole enterprise is lampshaded with a whole setpiece in a comic-book store. At a certain point, this wink-wink quality feels dated, but not in a way that recalls the 1980s: Instead, the early Obama-era quippery of the nascent Marvel Cinematic Universe comes heavily to mind.
