'Masters of the Universe' (2026): Nicholas Galitzine Powers a Gleefully Silly, Slightly Overstuffed Return to Eternia

I went into Masters of the Universe essentially unarmed: I recognize the character the way most people recognize him, but I never owned an action figure, never sat through the cartoon, and barely remember that the 1987 film exists. That absence of nostalgia turned out to be a useful vantage point, because judged purely as a summer blockbuster instead of a referendum on someone's childhood, this is a solid time at the movies — not a disaster, not a revelation, but a film that earns most of the goodwill it's asking for, even when it doesn't quite deserve the two hours and twenty minutes it takes up.

What sells that goodwill is the cast. Nicholas Galitzine (The Idea of You) holds the center with real sincerity, never treating Adam's uncertainty about who he's supposed to be as a punchline the way a lazier performance might. Camila Mendes (Do Revenge) matches him beat for beat as Teela, giving the character genuine agency instead of standard-issue love-interest scaffolding, and Idris Elba (Beast) brings a steadying gravity to Duncan that the movie's sillier stretches badly need. Jared Leto (House of Gucci), unrecognizable as Skeletor, delivers probably his best work in years, helped enormously by how thoroughly the character has been reworked in post-production, voice, face, and silhouette all remade into something so committed to its own theatricality that it stops feeling like a stunt and starts feeling like a real performance.

Credit for that balancing act belongs to Travis Knight (Bumblebee), who directs Masters of the Universe with a confidence that never curdles into cynicism: unapologetically silly, self-aware about its own cartoonishness, and still willing to dive headfirst into the earnest, world-building machinery sword-and-sorcery fantasy demands. That's a harder needle to thread than it sounds — plenty of legacy adaptations either drown their source material in irony or take themselves so seriously they forget to have fun — and Knight mostly manages both, letting Eternia feel like a tangibly lived-in kingdom even while the film cracks jokes about it. The action and visuals back that up: compelling and mostly consistent despite how visibly CGI-dependent the backdrops are, giving Eternia a texture a lot of green-screen-heavy blockbusters never manage.

The movie's biggest problem is one of excess, not ambition: this is simply too long for what it's telling, and a fantasy premise doesn't automatically earn an epic runtime just because the genre has a history of one. The comedy compounds that issue as the humor doesn't always land, and more than once it steps directly on top of a dramatic beat that might have actually hit if the film had trusted the moment to breathe instead of reflexively cutting to a joke. The sprawling ensemble suffers from the same instinct: outside of Adam and the broad, well-worn theme of rediscovering one's humanity, most of Eternia's warriors and villains get gestures instead of arcs. By the time the credits roll, He-Man doesn't need the Sword of Power to prove himself the strongest man in the universe — this cast already did that work for him, even if the movie around them occasionally forgot when to stop.

Rating: B-