Masters of the Universe (2026)
Mattel's He-Man reboot borrows too heavily from other modern blockbusters and undercuts its own message.
From the Author
Mattel has spent the better part of a decade trying to do what Hasbro did with Transformers and what its own Barbie pulled off in a single summer: turn a plastic shelf-filler into a self-sustaining cinematic engine. The trouble is that toys built to be smashed together on a bedroom floor do not automatically contain a story, and Masters of the Universe is the sound of a studio discovering that the hard way: fifteen years and a revolving door of directors and stars into development. What finally arrived feels less like the culmination of all that labor and more like a relic of the moment it was first greenlit, a 2009 idea that wandered into a 2026 release window and started telling jokes nobody asked for.
The film opens on Eternia before Skeletor's conquest, then drops a now-grown Prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) into the most quietly devastating fate the writers could imagine for a lost prince: a human resources job on Earth, where his stories about a sword and a green tiger read as the ramblings of a man who needs to be politely managed out of the building. When the Sword of Power surfaces and a creature from Eternia comes hunting, his childhood friend Teela (Camila Mendes) arrives to pull him back into the fight against Skeletor (Jared Leto), who has burned his home to the ground. The cast also includes Idris Elba as Man-At-Arms, Alison Brie as Evil-Lyn, Kristen Wiig as Roboto, and Morena Baccarin as the Sorceress.
The single most baffling thing about the movie is how nakedly it borrows from Thor: Ragnarok. This is something that goes beyond just the tone and vibe; you have the exiled hero stranded away from his realm, the eventual return to save it, and a third act with shots that feel lifted frame for frame. The problem is that Ragnarok worked because Taika Waititi's comic sensibility was load-bearing and the jokes belonged to specific characters. Here, everybody talks in the same register, which is the oldest Joss Whedon Avengers problem in the book. If you want a quick test for whether dialogue is doing its job, you should be able to cover the names on a script page and still know who is speaking. Masters of the Universe fails that test in nearly every scene. Adam, Teela, Roboto, and the rest are all cracking the same wink at the same imaginary camera, and the fish-out-of-water gag that should belong only to Adam gets diluted into the house style for the entire cast.
What sinks it deeper is that the film keeps undercutting the one idea it seems to actually believe in. The intended message is that you do not have to beat people into submission to solve your problems, that talking it out is the braver choice. Adam, fittingly, is an HR manager who tries to negotiate his way through conflict again and again. It is a real comedic engine, the hero who keeps insisting on diplomacy right up until the moment the plot needs a fight, but the movie never commits. Every attempt at talking ends with Adam using the power to flatten whoever is in front of him, and the climax is just him beating Skeletor senseless after Skeletor flatly refuses the conversation. You cannot build a story around the limits of violence and then resolve every beat with a haymaker. The character who starts the journey is the same character who ends it, the only revelation being that he was right about coming from Eternia, which you knew in the first five minutes.
The film is also catered to Gen X with a specificity I am not sure I have seen attempted at this scale, and that overcalculation or overcommitment is its own quiet tragedy. Masters of the Universe is a massive IP, the kind that once sold toys and cartoons and comics in a single ecosystem, and the safe move would have been to make something a new generation could inherit. Instead it chases a demographic that, by the rightward cultural drift of recent years, would frankly rather the movie exist so they can decline to see it and complain about it online. You can feel the same misfire that haunted the Star Wars sequels and the Ghostbusters reboot, the conviction that nostalgia is a strategy rather than a trap. For a frame of reference, Kevin Smith's animated Masters of the Universe: Revelation proved the material can be elevated into something modern and adult, richly animated and confident about who it was for. This film, by contrast, often looks like action figures being slammed together by someone three times the intended age, and the spotty CGI does not help. A cleaner visual pass might have nudged this up a notch.
The two product placements deserve a mention because they are so brazen they break the spell. A monster chasing the heroes through Earth gets creamed by an Amazon Prime delivery truck, in case you missed the logo at the front of the film, and somewhere along the way Adam is handed a glass bottle of Coke to pour himself at a table like a man auditioning for a beverage commercial. Studio-driven decisions like these tend to announce exactly who a movie is really serving.
The lone reason to give this two stars rather than one is an incredibly short, endearing sequence built around a cameo, where the elder statesman of the franchise's screen history meets the new Adam in a gym and offers advice that the film smartly pays off later. It works. It is also the cleanest argument the movie makes against itself, a reminder of the warmth and continuity this material can carry when someone bothers. There is a good Masters of the Universe film buried in here. It is just not on screen. If you want the experience this is reaching for, Thor: Ragnarok is already streaming and does the same thing with a fraction of the strain. Hopefully the franchise's next swing trusts the story before it trusts the brand.
★ ★
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