The Masters of the Universe movie It has good reviews, a seemingly infallible fan base and an 87% audience rating. on Rotten Tomatoes. And after its first weekend it is already one of the biggest box office failures of 2026: it seems that the inhabitants of Eternia cannot escape the curse of their audiovisual adaptations, which has followed them since that distant version of the Cannon of 1987. Although more prosaic issues come into play here than an old and endearing evil eye.
The figures. On the weekend of June 5 to 7, ‘He-Man and the Masters of the Universe’ raised 29.3 million dollars in the United States and 25 million in the 86 countries where it was released simultaneously, adding a global total of 54.3 million. It is calculated that Amazon MGM invested between 170 and 200 million dollars in production, which would make it necessary for the film, adding marketing expenses, to earn about 425 million just to recover what was invested.
For now, Amazon denies the biggest one: Kevin Wilson, head of domestic distribution at Amazon MGM, stated in a statement that the weekend represented “a very solid start” and that the audience response had been “fantastic.” The sights are set, very clearly, on Prime Video.
The eighties. The Masters of the Universe have been starring in the same story for about forty years. In August 1987, Cannon Films, the Israeli-American production company known for its films with Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson and other B-movie action stars, released the first live-action adaptation of the franchise, with Dolph Lundgren in the lead role. The budget was 22 million dollars. The final collection, 17.3 million. The failure, added to that of the tremendous ‘Superman IV’, contributed directly to the bankruptcy of Cannon Films.
What is the difference. However, the budget differences between the 1987 version and the 2026 version are very noticeable. In the Cannon Wager, for example, budget constraints prevented Orko or Battle Cat from appearing on screen, and most of the story took place in California, rather than Eternia, which was reduced to a couple of wastelands. The 2026 film has a better billing (although if you ask us, the cast of that one is unbeatable: Lundgren was joined by Frank Langella and Meg Foster) and, in fact, this one recovers sequences that were left out in the eighties, such as Beast Man’s attack on Earth. But it has been of no use.
Not understanding. What both versions do share is a commercial logic that has failed: a successful toy should produce a successful movie. When ‘Barbie’ raised 1.4 billion dollars globally in 2023Mattel drew a clear lesson: its toy franchises have economic potential on the big screen. The company launched the development of more than 14 films based on their catalog: ‘Hot Wheels’ produced by JJ Abrams, ‘Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots’ with Vin Diesel, ‘Polly Pocket’, ‘Barney’, ‘Magic 8 Ball’… ‘Masters of the Universe’ is the first big bet of this new era.
But that reading of ‘Barbie’ ignores why ‘Barbie’ worked. The box office of Greta Gerwig’s film had nothing to do with nostalgia for the original toys, but rather with turning that starting point into a commentary on gender roles that worked even for an audience that had not held a Barbie in their hands in decades, or even that despised the toy for considering that it conveyed a toxic message, precisely the opposite of that of the film. ‘He-Man’, however, appeals to the nostalgia of a very specific segment of the public, adult men who grew up with the animated series in the eighties, without offering anything to those outside that perimeter.
Liminals and parodies. A look at last weekend’s box office shows a panorama that Amazon has not been able to interpret. On the one hand there is the success of ‘Backrooms’. The A24 film, directed by Kane Parsons, cost 10 million dollars and has already been 212 million raised in less than two weeks. His film starts from a internet mythology about liminal spaceswithout a franchise to respect by heart, without decades of commercial history to sell. On the other hand, we have ‘Scary Movie’. The sixth installment of the Wayans brothers’ parody franchise, absent from theaters since 2013, grossed 55 million domestics and 105.5 million global with a budget of only 30 million.
The first works because Parsons has an organic connection to the material (twenty years old, YouTuber) and an audience that has followed him from the internet to the living room. ‘Scary Movie’ presents a direct proposal, and although it refers to past hits, it does not appeal to nostalgia and its audience knows exactly what they are going to see. Both films, in different ways, respond to a real demand. And ‘Masters of the Universe’, despite its indisputable virtues, seems designed to respond to a non-existent demand.
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