Masters of the Universe (2026) Review - He-Man Finally Gets the Movie He-Deserves
As the protagonist of Masters of the Universe, Prince Adam of Eternia (soon to be known as He-Man), recounts his origins to a date over dinner, he explains the history of the Sword of Power before shrugging off the sword’s particularly straightforward name with a simple:
“Yeah, that’s what they went with.”
That line tells you everything you need to know about what director Travis Knight has decided to do with this material – and it is exactly the right decision. Masters of the Universe is a film that is all too aware that it is based on a toy line featuring a muscle-bound hero in a leather skirt who draws power from a magic sword, fights a villain with a literal skull for a face, and is aided by supporting characters with names like Ram-Man and Fisto. It does not pretend otherwise. It does not strain for the po-faced seriousness that has undermined lesser franchise films built on equally preposterous foundations. It leans into the ridiculousness with the confidence of filmmakers who have correctly identified that the only way to make Masters of the Universe work on screen is to love it exactly as it is – goofiness, camp, and all – while simultaneously giving its characters genuine emotional weight and its action sequences genuine cinematic power.
The result is far better than an adaptation of a property this inherently silly has any right to be.
Nicholas Galitzine’s He-Man is the key to the film’s tonal success. He wears the goofy earnestness of a man who has spent his entire adult life being told that his deepest convictions are delusions, something that anyone who has ever been ridiculed for their ‘childish’ hobbies can appreciate, but when the transformation arrives and He-Man emerges, Galitzine shakes it off completely. The action sequences find him all business, and he delivers them with a physical commitment and a focused intensity that earn every moment. What makes the performance work across both registers is Galitzine’s willingness to let He-Man be genuinely ridiculous without condescension – to play the embarrassment straight without winking at the audience, which would be the easier and lazier choice.
The film’s self-mockery is consistent and good-natured. When He-Man, transported back to Eternia and overwhelmed by the recognition of heroes he drew as a child and was mocked for, begins addressing the assembled warriors of Eternia by the nicknames he invented for them – Ram-Man and Fisto receiving the same affectionate reverence he would give them in his childhood reveries – the assembled heroes’ eye-rolls are perfectly calibrated. This is a joke that even the most earnest fans of the original cartoon can appreciate, because it is not laughing at them. It is laughing alongside them. Knight, who demonstrated with 2018’s Bumblebee that he has a genuine gift for finding the emotional core within corporate franchise entertainment, understands that the way to honor a beloved property is not to pretend it’s something it isn’t, but to be honest about what it is and then make the most of it.
Camila Mendes brings an appealing energy to Teela, He-Man’s childhood friend from Eternia who arrives on Earth via spaceship to pull him back into the conflict he has been exiled from. Her dynamic with Galitzine has an easy chemistry that the film uses well – two people with a shared history navigating the strange situation of being adults in a world that continued without one of them. Idris Elba as Man-At-Arms, He-Man’s mentor on Eternia, observes the proceedings with the beaming pleasure of a performer who has decided that the best way to play this particular role is with complete sincerity, and his instinct is correct. The genuine warmth he brings to Man-At-Arms’ investment in He-Man’s journey gives the film an emotional anchor that its more self-aware moments need to play against.
And then there is Skeletor. The skull-faced villain is written with a particular kind of diabolical enthusiasm that occasionally tips toward self-parody before catching itself – and it is in that catching that the portrayal finds its best moments. When Skeletor’s malevolent laugh runs a little too long and trickles off into something resembling embarrassment, the film acknowledges the inherent comedy of the situation without deflating the genuine menace. It is a difficult needle to thread, and the cleverly-written script threads it more often than not.
The action sequences are raucous and impressively staged, bloodless in the manner required of a PG-13 rating but inventive enough that the constraint rarely chafes. Knight’s background as an animator – he directed 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings before Bumblebee – gives him an instinct for the spatial clarity that large-scale fantasy action requires, and the film never loses its audience in the chaos of its biggest set pieces, all set to an absolutely joyous score by Daniel Pemberton. Battle Cat, He-Man’s iridescent green talking tiger, doesn’t get nearly enough screen time, but what he gets is excellent – the eye-roll he delivers before He-Man climbs onto his back is one of the film’s most purely enjoyable moments.
What Travis Knight has done with Masters of the Universe is something that screenwriter David Odell’s 1987 version – with all its inadvertent charm and Frank Langella hamming magnificently through a skull mask – never managed: making a film that works on its own terms as genuine science-fantasy storytelling, not merely as an exercise in so-bad-it’s-good camp. The 1987 film is a beloved cult classic precisely because it failed so entertainingly, but the 2026 film succeeds in ways that the earlier version never even attempted, giving the property’s wacky mythology the coherence and emotional investment it always deserved.
The film is also, quietly, a demonstration of how much the landscape of franchise filmmaking has changed in the 39 years between adaptations. The age of the self-aware corporate blockbuster – best exemplified by the DC and Marvel films of recent years, which have made the balance between the skewed and the sincere into an art form – has created space for a Masters of the Universe that can acknowledge its own ridiculousness while refusing to let that acknowledgment become an excuse for laziness. By the time He-Man raises the Sword of Power and declares his famous transformation, the film has done more than enough work to make the moment land with genuine feeling rather than ironic distance.
Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe is, by any honest accounting, a genuinely great work of science-fantasy storytelling that repays its audience’s goodwill with generous invention, committed performances, and the particular pleasure of a film that knows exactly what it is and decides, without embarrassment or apology, to be the best version of that thing it can possibly be.
By the power of Grayskull – this movie truly does have the power.