I can't say that I paid much attention to the publicity attending the making and release of the live-action He-Man movie. Aside from having not paid real attention to that particular franchise for a very long time (I gave it almost no thought between the early 2000s Cartoon Network edition going off the air and the strange experience of running into a Heritage Foundation review of Kevin Smith's sequel series), it increasingly seems to me that cartoons should generally be left as cartoons rather than transformed into live-action projects where, as we are reminded again and again, much that "worked" in animated form doesn't in the live-action version and as a result either gets mutilated or chucked out or kept but only annoys everybody in doing so. Indeed, with Spider-Man having demonstrated that an animated Hollywood action movie can make real money, and the downward pressure on studio bottom lines of recent years providing an additional incentive to go the animation route (yes, you can save money this way), the studios seem to have less excuse than ever to continue along their make-the-cartoon-a-live-action-movie path not only from an artistic perspective, but the crass commercial one that is the only one the Suited vulgarians really care about, and that if they had any business sense (never mind artistic sense) they would make cartoons about cartoons as they devote their live-action filmmaking efforts to movies about, you know, people.
Meanwhile, the problems with this kind of adaptation generally aside it seemed to me that giving He-Man specifically this treatment was a dubious commercial prospect. So far as I can tell this is not a franchise whose runners have renewed their fan base by winning younger followers (as against, for instance, the evergreen Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), which means that middle-aged folks are the ones who have any attachment to it, all as from the standpoint of the practicalities of exploiting a largely mined-out '80s nostalgia getting those who were kids in the '80s to go to the theater for The Power of Grayskull is probably trickier than getting them to go to the theater to satisfy the Need for Speed. In reality Top Gun may be no smarter or more "adult" as viewing goes than the stuff of a kid's cartoon from the '80s, indeed, is in many respects is less so. (Children's show that it was He-Man did in its stronger episodes rise above the same-good-guys-thrash-the-same-bad-guys-in-every-episode format, and if anything espoused a more mature value system and world-view, not least in regard to war, than the cheap pop militarism that made Top Gun such an Establishment darling.) Still, our assorted cultural prejudices mean that middle-aged dudes are probably a lot less embarrassed about buying a ticket to see Tom Cruise jump into a jet than one to see a muscleman yell "I HAVE THE POWER!" Additionally the kind of hysterical media cheerleading Top Gun 2 had on its side in the summer of '22, and which made a difference in its prospects as important as it is overlooked by the vast majority of the commentariat was not to be expected on He-Man's behalf.
But the inherently ill-conceived character of cartoon-to-live-action adaptation generally and longshot character of this project in particular weren't enough for the folks making the movie, as I found out coming into contact with the publicity for the film. Did they seriously make another live-action He-Man movie where the characters spend the movie in our world instead of Eternia, even though the fans hated that about the cheapo Cannon Films movie from '87? Yes they did--while even bringing Dolph "I have all the acting range and charisma of the solidified contents of a septic tank" Lundgren as if being reminded of his part in that unfortunate film would delight fans. (You go in for such metafictional evocation when there is affection for the old version, not when there isn't.) Did they seriously decide to make the He-Man movie a "male Barbie?" Yes they did, either oblivious or indifferent to the fact that men didn't exactly love Greta Gerwig's pour-gasoline-on-the-fire-of-the-wretched-kulturkampf epic about a fashion doll, and that those who go in for nostalgia for '80s action cartoons could be expected to have loved it less than most--the executives' "monkey see, monkey do" compulsion to imitate the nearest success simply too overwhelming for those calling the shots. Did they build this Masters-of-the-Universe-characters-running-about-on-our Earth, Dolph Lundgren-presenting, Barbie treatment on a thematic foundation of "woke gender" politics-flavored-subversion-of–the-franchise-cum-steaming-pile-of-self-help-crapola? Yes they "I'm Just Ken" did. Did the very expensive feature film these "creative decisions" produced flop hard? Yes it has, the $200 million production predictably opening with under $30 million in North America in its first Friday-to-Sunday period, and plummeting seventy percent from that low level in its second weekend on the way to a feeble final domestic tally of barely twice its opening gross ($65 million--no, good word-of-mouth did not save this one by making it "leggy"), all as it made even less money overseas on the way to a final worldwide gross in the $115 million range. A veritable box office disaster (a nine figure loss a near-certainty given the numbers we know), it reminds all who needed reminding that, however much their courtiers in the press tell us the people in the C-Suites are the smartest guys in the room, they are actually the dumbest guys in any room. Still, even seeing the film prove commercially dead on arrival I thought to myself that we might not have seen the summer's biggest flop yet as, once again, badly battered yet absolutely unteachable Hollywood releases a pre-pandemic roster of would-be blockbusters into the shrunken post-pandemic/forever COVID movie market. And indeed, as I write now (in mid-July) it seems that if the folks at Deadline are braver about holding a Most Valuable Blockbuster tournament for 2026 than they have been holding one for 2025 that other animated-to-live-action flop Moana (not Disney's first, likely not to be its last), and Supergirl, will make the rankings on the flops' list "competitive."
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