Review Roundup: Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe
If you’re of a certain age, then the words “By the power of Greyskull” is basically a core memory. Created in the early ’80s by Mattel to compete with Star Wars — after Mattel lost untold millions because they passed on a deal to make Star Wars toys — He-Man became one of the decade’s most popular toy lines. In 1983, the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe cartoon series took to the airwaves with 130 episodes of sci-fantasy action.
A live-action adaptation titled Masters of the Universe followed in 1987, with Dolph Lundgren and Frank Langella starring as He-Man and Skeletor, respectively. The film was a critical and commercial disaster, but that did little to dull the franchise’s popularity. Other adaptations were released in the following years, including a Kevin Smith-produced animated series for Netflix that adopted a darker, more mature tone.
Which brings us to 2026’s Masters of the Universe, another live-action adaptation by director Travis Knight (Bumblebee, Kubo and the Two Strings) starring Nicholas Galitzine, Alison Brie, James Purefoy, Idris Elba, and Jared Leto. This time around, a young Prince Adam (Galitzine) must find his way back to Eternia after being exiled on Earth for 15 years, and rescue his homeworld from the evil grasp of Skeletor (Leto). So, does the power of Greyskull reside within Knight’s film? Or should this franchise just remain a beloved childhood memory? Read on for a selection of critics’ reactions to Masters of the Universe.
It’s cartoony and campy, which it is also constantly apologizing for. It’s also violent enough to probably rule out the under-10 crowd. It’s aiming for something in the vein of a Taika Waititi Thor or a Guardians of the Galaxy, but it doesn’t fully commit to the thing that the HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA video understood so well: He-Man is extremely silly. Not just the character. The whole thing: the look, the names, even the phrase “by the power of Greyskull, I have the power.”
As much as one might appreciate the lore and world-building of the 2002 reboot animated series, or Kevin Smith’s more recent earnest attempts with the Netflix series Masters of the Universe: Revelation, one of the key things that Knight’s film seems to understand is that you have to make the silliness the entire point. At the same time, Masters of the Universe has a ton of heart, and might be one of the best feel-good summer blockbusters in years.
I do not dispute that this is mildly amusing; there were people in my theater who laughed quite heartily at several of these gags. “Fisto” is, objectively, a very funny name for a character based on a children’s toy. But it really gets to the annoying, leering wink at the heart of Masters of the Universe, a movie that seems to exist entirely in the hopes of turning any discrete 45-second chunk of footage into a GIFable, memeable moment, something to amuse people on social media once this thing hits home video in six or seven weeks, if not sooner.
The modest joys and bigger foundational issues inherent in Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe movie, out this weekend, is that it attempts to be both things: the cute (and relatively ancient) kids cartoon that many young kids today don’t even have parents young enough to remember, and the post-modern comedy aware of its own silliness. And whether you like him or not, Jared Leto gets the assignment brilliantly with Skeletor, who alongside Alison Brie’s mischievous Evil-Lyn sorceress, steals much of the movie.
Masters of the Universe is a movie that has no business being as delightful as it is. That’s partially because MOTU, as a property, has no business working as well as it always has, going back forty years. Mattel Toys originally conceived it as an action figure line to compete with Star Wars. Mattel employees Roger Sweet and Mark Taylor took 1970s-era Frank Frazetta fantasy artwork, Flash Gordon sci-fi, and the in-vogue bodybuilding mania of the Arnold Schwarzenegger era, and smashed it all together into something that obsessed kids in the ’80s. And all of those elements have now been translated miraculously onto the big screen into something so fun, one can’t resist it.
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.
It’s kind of insane that in the year of our lord, two thousand and twenty-six, there is a $200 million-dollar tentpole adaptation of a forty-four-year-old children’s cartoon that is expressly aimed at those of us who grew up in the last wave of Gen X cynicism. And yet, what Travis Knight has created in the new Masters of the Universe somehow manages to be both reverent and irreverent at the same time in a way that manages to slyly awaken and sate the eternal child in all of us.
From the colorful landscapes of Eternia to the vivid recreations of ’80s armored warriors to the crisp and clear action sequences enhanced by Industrial Light & Magic, everything about Masters of the Universe is stunning to behold. So before Hollywood learns the wrong lesson from this summer and starts pumping out dark, creepypasta adaptations instead, take advantage of what might be your last chance to experience the magic of big-budget maximalist sci-fi fantasy spectacle for a very long time.
[Travis Knight] aspired to make sure Masters of the Universe threaded a difficult needle: a movie that unabashedly loves this universe and its characters, but also makes it accessible to an audience who doesn’t. Something that’s exciting, emotional, and just campy enough. Unfortunately, he and the film mostly fail to hit that tiny bullseye of tone, resulting in a film that’s ambitious and beautiful, but ultimately a let down.
Far from a gritty reimagining, this new version of Masters of the Universe is determined to wink at the camera and appeal to your nostalgia. Not everything works, and it would have been nice to have a more menacing villain, but it’s a good time if you leave your cynicism at the door.
There’s a deadpan approach to some of the movie’s most outlandish elements that works more often than not, provided He-Man isn’t something you hold sacred. This franchise has always felt like a little boy mashed all his favorite things together and called it a story: Robots and swords and magic and talking tigers and a scary villain with a skull for a face. Knight’s take leans hard into that, even coming up with a vaguely rational explanation for using some of the silliest character names, including Mekaneck and Ram-Man and Fisto.
The old He-Man canon is preposterous, which is not fatal in itself, but Masters of the Universe wants devotion and adoration simply for checking off its dumbest tropes. The nods to the toys, the cartoons, and the 1980s live-action film are staged with the smugness of a movie treating basic recognition as emotional payoff. The callbacks do not deepen the world or sharpen the joke; they sit there, cloying and obvious, as if familiarity alone were enough.
Masters of the Universe arrives in theaters on June 5, 2026. Watch the trailer below.
