Decoding today’s He-Man

Director Travis Knight and screenwriter Chris Butler tell The Free Press Journal about their upcoming He-Man movie, Masters of the Universe

Kabir Singh Bhandari

The new He-Man movie, Masters of the Universe, releasing this week, has been directed by Travis Knight and stars Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Adam/He-Man and Jared Leto as Skeletor. The story revolves around Prince Adam, who discovers he is part of a secret legacy as the prince of an alien planet and must recover a magic sword and return home to protect his kingdom from Skeletor.

The first He-Man film was made in 1987, with a sequel that had been planned but got cancelled. Over the years, several directors and actors were part of new projects, but none worked out.

Now, with the new film finally releasing, it would be interesting to see how its fandom holds out in a world that has been overtaken by the superheroes of Marvel and DC. But how similar to the 1980s comics shall the new movie be?

“There’ve been so many iterations over the years, and each time it’s been slightly reinvented,” says screenwriter Chris Butler, an animation veteran who has worked on the scripts for ParaNorman, Kubo and the Two Strings, and wrote and directed Missing Link. “So, as a fan, I’ve just taken the bits from each of those iterations that I’ve liked, really starting with the action figures and the Filmation series, and I’ve been able to pull that together into something new, hopefully.”

That also meant he and fellow Masters of the Universe screenwriters Aaron Nee and Adam Nee (2022’s The Lost City) and Dave Callaham (2023’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, 2021’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) wanted to not just tip their hats to the past but also add their own takes to the storyline. “You want to make it your own thing,” Butler adds. Among their changes was finding a way for Prince Adam to grow up far from Eternia and live a relatively normal life on Earth, so the wonder he feels toward his home world matches the surprise felt by the audience.

“Anytime you have characters whose story goes back over 40 years, there's going to be a bunch of variations of that thing,” director Travis Knight says.

“The He-Man and Masters of the Universe in the early ’80s is the one I always go back to because that’s where it started. The Prince Adam and He-Man of the Filmation series was kind of like the Clark Kent-Superman dynamic. He put on a facade of someone who was timid, who was a little bit lazy, and then he becomes He-Man, and we see a different side of him,” Knight said.  

Will one of pop culture’s most iconic fantasy worlds fascinate a new generation who’ve grown up on Iron Man and Hulk? Looks like we shall find out this Friday.