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Reports suggest Travis Knight’s Masters of the Universe made just $54m (£40m) globally on debut at the weekend, a figure that, while not exactly fatal, would usually be considered a disappointment for a mainstream movie with a budget of more than $200m. Worse still, this heavily caffeinated, meta take on the 1980s TV show arrived carrying the weight of a major studio relaunch and decades of pent-up nostalgia. On paper at least, its bow looks less like the birth of a cinematic universe than the sort of expensive stumble from which some franchises never recover.
So why then does everyone involved in this thing seem so cheerful? “Travis Knight and the entire cast and film-making team have delivered something truly special,” Amazon MGM’s Kevin Wilson gushed to Variety. “This opening is exactly the kind of critical first moment that validates our holistic distribution strategy – building awareness and engagement that will carry well beyond the theatrical window.”
Meanwhile, Knight has been talking up the possibility of sequels, after the movie appeared to introduce He-Man’s twin She-Ra in a mid-credits scene. “With every movie that I’ve ever made, I’ve always imagined where the characters go outside … the bounds of the movie,” Knight told TechRadar. “You want to tell a self-contained story, and I think we’ve done that with this movie, but there are things within the wider mythology that didn’t fit within that, and the She-Ra character was one of them.”
“Adora is also a character that carries a lot of weight with her,” he added. “A lot of people, myself included, love that character, so we wanted to give a little nod to where that could go if we were given the opportunity to tell more stories.”
So far, so positive. Yet the real question is: why? Data from the opening weekend suggests that nearly 40% of Masters of the Universe’s audience were over 45, hinting that nostalgia for the original show probably fuelled much of the film’s relatively meagre box office take. That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the movie’s run, as it may well be that the core audience have already seen it.
Maybe, in a world where streaming giants are studios and toy manufacturers wield the sort of power once reserved for Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, it doesn’t really matter. Masters of the Universe was popular with audiences (Rotten Tomatoes says 87% of filmgoers liked it), and Mattel and Amazon have effectively revived a franchise that hasn’t really been big since Choppers were the coolest bikes in town.
Read a little deeper into Wilson’s statement on the film’s opening and you might wonder if that quote about “holistic distribution strategy” is really a boast about owning the cinema release, the streaming service and much of the ecosystem that follows. “By the power of Grayskull, I have the power!” it is not – but it does have the unmistakable ring of a man who controls the castle gates. Once it hits Prime, Amazon’s algorithms will presumably place Masters of the Universe in front of just about everyone in the world who owns a TV, and by the time part two rolls around in a couple of years, we’ll all be wondering how we ever did without this saga on the big screen for almost four decades.
If weak box office no longer kills commercial movies, that may not be the worst thing ever – because Masters of the Universe actually has a bit too much going for it to be a complete dud. The existence of She-Ra really does give the project franchise potential and Knight’s film is enjoyable enough in a nostalgic sort of way. Is the idea that a modern blockbuster can survive on streaming, toys and audience goodwill alone really so terrible?
But even if all this is true, none of it magically turns a $54m opening against a $200m-plus budget into Top Gun: Maverick. A franchise still needs new fans, not just parents revisiting Eternia, and there’s little evidence just yet that Masters of the Universe has actually managed to find them.
