Masters of the Universe Review: Mattel’s Plastic Franchise Ambition Falls like Toy Soldiers.

By Akinwande Jordan

Starring Nicholas Galitzine, Camila Mendes and Idris Elba, Masters of the Universe brings Mattel’s iconic He-Man mythology to the big screen in a fantasy adventure about power, destiny and the battle for Eternia.

In Hollywood, toys are us. Mattel's confidence has acquired, from the marketplace of ideas, the force of historical inevitability. The atom-bomb-vanquishing commercial triumph of Greta Gerwig's Barbie transformed a century-old toy manufacturer into Hollywood's latest intellectual-property factory, where every defunct line of plastic figures, board games and lunchbox mascots now appears divinely ordained by the gods of cinema. This is the great plastic hope of franchise filmmaking. The trade of the insensate.

Masters of the Universe emerges as the first serious test of that ambition, carrying with it the accrued weight of four decades of Saturday-morning mythology, comic books and action figures. Its very existence raises the question that contemporary franchise filmmaking increasingly evades: what, precisely, makes this property worthy of a $200m film in 2026?

NICHOLAS GALITZINE AS ADAM| PHOTO CREDIT: GILES KEYTE. 

Answering that question is as improbable as finding a subatomic needle in a galactical haystack. Travis Knight approaches He-Man with the putative lingua franca of the modern blockbuster. The film embraces the gaudy pleasures of 1980s fantasy, then undercuts them with a steady stream of jokes and knowing glances because, let's face it, what's a blockbuster without a modicum of irony? Every sincere moment is followed by a reminder that everyone is in on the joke. The approach keeps the adventure moving, yet it also leaves the film reluctant to surrender fully to its own mythology. It spends so much time reassuring the audience that it understands its own absurdity and conspicuous ridiculousness that it rarely allows that absurdity to become genuinely exhilarating.

This tonal hesitation becomes the film's governing condition. Masters of the Universe wants the pleasures of camp, the emotional gravity of fantasy and the knowing self-awareness of contemporary franchise cinema. These impulses keep colliding. The mythology is treated as something to be simultaneously inhabited and apologised for, as though the film fears the audience might laugh at He-Man unless it laughs first. The result is a peculiar kind of timidity: a $200m spectacle continually asking permission to be spectacular.

The problem extends to the world itself. Eternia is burdened with the mythology of a franchise that has spent decades accumulating characters, iconography and lore, yet the film rarely discovers an aesthetic language that belongs specifically to it. There are traces of Star Wars, Superman and James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy scattered throughout the production, with the latter's irreverence particularly visible in its comic rhythms and ensemble dynamics. The influences are legible; the identity remains elusive. The film keeps reaching towards the familiar grammar of other successful franchises, searching for the syntax in which He-Man might finally become contemporary.

Nicholas Galitzine's Adam embodies this uncertainty. He is introduced on Earth as a human-resources employee, his childhood training in martial combat transmuted into an adult vocation centred on negotiation and conflict resolution. The conceit offers the film a useful route into its ideas about masculinity: the body built for battle confronting a world in which communication, patience and emotional intelligence possess greater value. There is a potentially interesting film inside that premise. Masters of the Universe touches it, then returns to the more conventional pleasures of the superhero origin story.

             IDRIS ELBA AS MAN-AT-ARMS |PHOTO CREDIT: 

The same incompleteness governs its romance, comedy and supporting characters. Idris Elba and Kristen Wiig are left to supply comic energy to material that rarely gives them enough room to develop it. Jared Leto's Skeletor performs villainy with an extravagant theatricality that belongs to another, more committed film. Even the Amazon delivery-van cameo carries the peculiar sensation of watching a corporation wandering into its own fantasy world to remind us who paid for the thing.

JARED LETO AS SKELETOR| Photo Credit: Amazon MGM Studios

The action sequences share the same problem. They are crowded, expensive and aggressively edited, yet the sheer accumulation of movement rarely produces exhilaration. Maximalism becomes a substitute for excitement. At 143 minutes, the film has room to develop its mythology, its characters and its emotional ideas, yet it often feels simultaneously overstuffed and hollow. Every corridor leads to another piece of lore; every dramatic beat arrives with another quip; every revelation seems to prepare the machinery for a franchise that the film itself has yet to persuade us to want.

This is where the Barbie comparison becomes unavoidable. Mattel discovered with Gerwig that a toy could become the raw material for something culturally expansive. Barbie found an intellectual and aesthetic proposition inside its plastic object. It converted the commercial artefact into a film capable of interrogating, albeit superficially, femininity, consumerism, identity and the strange metaphysics of being manufactured for human desire. Masters of the Universe possesses the same commercial inheritance and considerably less artistic curiosity about what that inheritance might mean.

The distinction matters because the current Mattel strategy depends upon a dangerous assumption: that recognisable intellectual property is naturally imbued with the cultural necessity required for cinema. A He-Man figure, a board game, a toy car or a collection of plastic dolls can possess enormous commercial value while remaining dramatically inert. Cinema has to perform the alchemy. It has to discover the idea, the image or the emotional contradiction that makes the object newly alive.

Masters of the Universe spends much of its running time trying to convince us that He-Man remains alive in our collective consciousness. The more interesting question is why we should believe it. Its failure is therefore larger than the failure of one expensive fantasy adventure. The film exposes the limits of an industrial faith in intellectual property. Mattel has discovered that its toys can become bankable movies. But Hollywood is now discovering the harder truth: a toy can provide the mythology, the logo, the characters and the audience recognition depending on the generation it is catering to. It, however, cannot provide the reason for the film beyond the ravenous desire for profit. 

Masters of the Universe is the first serious warning that the great plastic hope of franchise filmmaking may contain a great deal of plastic and considerably less hope.