The long-awaited live-action Masters of the Universe, directed by Travis Knight and released in June 2026, has landed with a thud among European critics but provoked a more forgiving response elsewhere. The film reinvents the 1980s cartoon by marooning Prince Adam (Nicholas Galitzine) on Earth for 15 years after a Skeletor assault, stripping him of his magic sword and forcing him into corporate drudgery before a belated return to Eternia. This radical departure from the source material, intended to ground the fantasy, has instead drawn sharp criticism from reviewers in Sweden and France, who dismiss the film as a soulless exercise in intellectual property exploitation.

Viewed from Rome, the film grapples awkwardly with the hyper-masculine archetype that defined the original toy line. The term ‘He-Man’ itself, as Italian commentators note, predates Mattel as American slang for a muscle-bound braggart—a concept that chafes against contemporary sensibilities. Swedish critics skewer the result as having ‘a bodybuilder’s body but the soul of an HR middle manager’, a verdict echoed in Paris, where Le Devoir unfavourably compares the film to Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, which shrewdly satirised its source material. The French paper argues that Knight’s film, by contrast, lacks any such self-awareness, content to recycle tropes without irony.

Yet the film has its defenders. In Australia, The Canberra Times awards four stars, celebrating a pure nostalgia hit that taps into the fitness obsessions and childhood dreams of a generation raised on the cartoon and its plastic avatars. The production further woos loyalists with a cameo from Dolph Lundgren, the Swedish actor who embodied He-Man in the 1987 flop, appearing here in a deliberately oblique role—not as King Randor, as rumoured, but in a meta wink to fans. Spanish-language outlets also highlight a post-credits scene that introduces Orko, the diminutive floating wizard from Trolla, whose blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance sets up a potential sequel. This split screen—between nostalgia-bait and critical disdain—mirrors the broader challenge facing Hollywood’s recycling of 1980s properties.

The film’s post-credits stinger, teasing a figure central to the wider mythology, signals Mattel’s ambition to build a cinematic universe after the triumph of Barbie. But the tepid European reception suggests that mere brand recognition may not suffice. As the dust settles on Eternia, the lesson from this incarnation is that even the power of Grayskull cannot paper over a muddled script. Whether a sequel emerges may depend less on critical consensus than on global box-office returns—and on whether audiences find more charm in the buffoonish Orko than in the film’s own uncertain identity.