Masters of the Universe

Travis Knight directs the end point of a project that had changed hands since 2009. Sony took the rights from Warner Bros.; directors including Jon M. Chu, McG and David S. Goyer came and went; Noah Centineo, cast as He-Man in 2019, left in 2021. Netflix took over in 2022 and cast Kyle Allen, then cancelled in July 2023 on budget grounds, $30 million into development. Amazon MGM bought it in 2024. That history sits in the credits: the offscreen additional literary material credit lists 17 writers, among them David Odell, who wrote the 1987 adaptation. This is not Knight’s first live action feature; in 2018 he made Bumblebee, also out of an eighties toy line. Jared Leto asked for Skeletor himself and went straight to the studio. Shooting was at Sky Studios Elstree in London, with exteriors at Canary Wharf, Wells Cathedral and the Wookey Hole caves, and some work in Iceland. Of 2,180 effects shots, 793 went to ILM and 750 to DNEG, which built Eternos from walled towns in Italy and Welsh castles. A good fit if you want Eternia derived from real stonework and Leto given room to play Skeletor large. Not for viewers outside the eighties cartoon nostalgia; the second weekend fell 70 percent and Variety and TheWrap tied that to exactly that narrow audience.