I’m not really sure how relevant a new Masters of the Universe movie is in 2026. I don’t have kids of my own so I’m unaware of the popularity with younger audiences beyond the Skeletor meme.
In the mid-1980s, He-Man and the show had reached peak popularity. In the aftermath of the success of Star Wars toys, more toys were produced for any movie or so. Despite an urban legend, the toys weren’t intended to be for the 1982 Conan the Barbarian movie yet Mattel backed out because of the movie’s graphic violence/gore and sexual content.
But as the toy line and cartoon series grew in popularity, a live-action movie was inevitable. Unfortunately, no one really had a clue had to do one. And judging from the reception and poor box office of the latest one, no one still does apparently.
Produced and distributed by the troublesome Cannon Group film company, financing was a disaster with the final confrontation between He-Man (Dolph Lundgren) and Skeletor (Frank Langella) reduced to taking place on a mostly bare set with dark lighting. Rumor has it that Mattel and Cannon producers had an agreement to go halves but when Mattel’s money ran out, Cannon balked at coming up with the rest. This left the toy company to pony up more angry the movie wouldn’t have been completed otherwise.
Director Gary Goddard had to finance the climax using a skeleton crew. Also it’s a He-Man movie where the main protagonist is almost the Invisible Man because the bulk of the movie involves a young Courtney Cox as Julie Winston, an Earthling grieving the lost of her parents.
Actually very little of the movie is actually set in Eternia as He-Man, Teela (Chelsea Fields) and Man-At-Arms (Jon Cypher) are transported to Earth by a Cosmic Key, a device created by Gwildor (Billy Barty), an dwarfish elf-troll hybrid created as a substitute for Orko. And Gwildor seems to spend more time on screen than He-Man.
You know a movie is going to be bad when a lot of screen time takes place in back alleys or a rocky terrain in the desert (as a substitute for Eternia).
Beast Man does pop up but more like a glorified background extra. Most of the most popular characters are MIA. Meg Foster is perfect as Evil-Lyn for what she is given to do and Langella is wonderful as Skeletor you just wish he was in the movie longer.
But Cannon was cutting corners everywhere. Despite having this and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace released within weeks in the summer of 1987, both movie productions ran out of money and most of the movie looks like a cheap Star Wars knockoff that came out in the late 1970s or early 1980s.
It’s probably no wonder that Lundgren in only his third movie role and first lead had told people he wasn’t going to return if there was a sequel.
It feels like a rejected script about a teen struggling with grief was added to whatever Dave Odell had originally written that was deemed unfilmable. I keep thinking of the line in Ghostbusters II where they show up at the kids birthday party and someone says, “I thought it was gonna be He-Man.”
Yeah, we all did. That’s why it failed at the box office.
Zane Says 