Masters of the Universe Review: He-Man Has the Power — But Not the Box Office

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By TRH Entertainment Desk I June 2026. Film Review.

Travis Knight’s ambitious revival of the iconic franchise delivers strong performances from Nicholas Galitzine and Jared Leto, but struggles to balance its mythology, comedy, and blockbuster ambitions as it opens below expectations at the box office.

Travis Knight’s long-awaited He-Man reboot is better than it had any right to be, and considerably worse than a $200 million budget has any right to produce.

The most powerful man in the universe opened in cinemas this weekend and promptly got beaten by a parody film. That brutal irony is hard to shake while watching Masters of the Universe — Amazon MGM’s big-swinging attempt to launch the next great toy-franchise blockbuster — because the film itself is, at heart, a movie perpetually at war with itself.

The story follows Prince Adam, portrayed by Nicholas Galitzine, who returns to Eternia after fifteen years of separation only to find his home destroyed under the iron rule of Skeletor, played by Jared Leto. Adam must team with Teela, played by Camila Mendes, and Duncan/Man-At-Arms, played by Idris Elba, to embrace his destiny as He-Man.

Director Travis Knight, who breathed unexpected soul into Bumblebee, is clearly trying to do something similar here. Knight teases the possibility of performing a similar miracle, with Galitzine selling He-Man as both himbo and hero, while Leto gives a hilarious, Shakespearean lift to Skeletor — portraying him as a self-doubting dark lord who throws tantrums when his villainous proclamations don’t inspire sufficient terror. These moments work. The trouble is that the film can’t commit to them long enough.

The fight is between conflicting tones that jostle and elbow each other until a frustrating, if generally entertaining, draw is declared. Knight takes the trendy path by trying to out-Ragnarok the third Thor film, piling on jokes where nobody expects them.

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The film buries its heartening Barbie-style deconstruction under every terrible action-comedy instinct plaguing modern blockbuster filmmaking. There’s a genuinely interesting idea buried somewhere in this film about masculine identity, inherited expectation, and the weight of destiny — and it keeps surfacing only to be immediately smothered by another quip or CGI set piece.

Where the film genuinely shines is in its performances. Galitzine, who underwent a physically gruelling transformation for the role, carries a thin premise further than most would manage through deft, bewildered swapping of alpha and beta male personae. Meanwhile, as IGN’s Clint Gage noted, Leto’s Skeletor gives a “delightfully weird and cartoonish energy to every scene he’s in,” and YouTube critic Jeremy Jahns called him “the most fun happening on screen at any given time.”

The critical consensus, sitting at 74 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, is broadly generous. One review called it “plainly imperfect: overlong, sometimes too winking, and occasionally flattened by the digitally homogenized look of modern blockbusters,” but acknowledged that as a version of the property bridging generational gaps, it has at least a little power. The Hollywood Reporter’s Frank Scheck noted it touches all the fan-serving bases, with a fun cameo from a star of a previous film incarnation.

The box office, however, has been unforgiving. The He-Man reboot opened to an estimated $31.1 million domestically — at the very bottom of the initial $30–$40 million estimate range for a film carrying a reported $170 million-plus budget. As Movieweb laid out bluntly, a $35 million opening for a $200 million production would be a terrible start, particularly for a movie that needs to gross at least $400 million to succeed.

The disappointment is real but not total. Masters of the Universe is too entertaining to be written off entirely, and too scattered to be celebrated. He-Man didn’t need to be reinvented into something embarrassed by its own muscles, sword, and mythology. He needed to be sold as something cool. Amazon MGM had the brand, the budget, the cast, and the director. What they produced is a film that occasionally remembers all of that — and then forgets again.

By the power of Grayskull? Not quite. But closer than the box office suggests.