Concept art from the Masters of the Universe movies that never got made has surfaced, and it looks nothing like the campy comedy Amazon just watched crater at the box office.
Veteran creature and character designer Constantine Sekeris, who by his own account spent close to 15 years on the project across multiple regimes, has spent the past two weeks unloading design work on Instagram, including art from the version developed at Sony when David S. Goyer was attached, and the Adam and Aaron Nee version that followed.
Goyer, for those keeping score, wrote Blade, co-wrote Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, and wrote Man of Steel. Sekeris describes the script from that era as a “badass script… edgy and cool.”
Edgy and cool. Remember those?
Skeletor as nightmare fuel
The lineup above spans Sekeris’ years on the project under different directors, and there isn’t a joke in sight.
Skeletor is a rotting horror. Trap Jaw is a hulking cyborg monster. Evil-Lyn looks like she walked out of a dark fantasy epic.
Fans in the comments immediately clocked the tone, with one asking whether these came from Goyer’s version and another describing the set as a darker, more serious take on the material.
The Merman designs Sekeris confirms came directly from the Goyer era, developed alongside production designer Alec Hammond: a living, breathing aquatic creature with real scales and fish textures that still keeps the character’s signature color pattern and silhouette. Grounded, not goofy.
The Nee Brothers version was headed to camera
When Adam and Aaron Nee came aboard, Sekeris was made a lead on creatures and characters, building out a design team with Jerad Marantz and Luca Nemolato and working closely with costume designer Ann Foley.
What he’s revealed about that version makes it sting even more.
In the Nees’ script, Skeletor wore a head-to-toe armored suit that Sekeris compares to Darth Vader, and this wasn’t napkin-sketch territory. Approved 3D models were being prepped for Ironhead Studios to build the actual suit and for Mattel to turn into toys. That’s a movie in pre-production, not a pitch deck.
Beastman got samurai-inspired armor in his iconic orange-and-red palette, layered like armadillo plates so a performer could actually move through stunts, with practical suit and makeup builds explored to keep as much of him in-camera as possible.
Orko was being grounded with a lemur-like animal base to make the little guy work in live action, and Sekeris flat-out says the Nees wrote an amazing script for both fans and the studio.
Here’s the detail that should make Mattel executives wince: Roboto was designed to debut imposing and intimidating, with her soft voice as the comedic contrast, and then “graduate” closer to her classic cartoon look with each sequel. Sequels, plural.
The Nees were architecting a franchise arc, not a one-off. Sekeris notes his Roboto concept actually survived into the finished Travis Knight film — Kristen Wiig voices her — as did his Battle Cat model, which other artists finished for the movie.
Even Moss Man got the prestige treatment in earlier eras: Sekeris says those explorations deliberately chased the Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones tone that was dominating at the time, a bark-and-roots creature of the forest instead of another buff guy with moss glued on. One version even imagined a young Moss Man growing up in a tribe of forest people.
Meanwhile, the movie we actually got
Instead of any of that, Amazon MGM released a Masters of the Universe that plays He-Man for laughs — even Wikipedia classifies the thing as a comedy — and audiences responded accordingly.
The film opened to just $31 million on June 5 and has been bleeding out since.
Here’s where things stand as of July 9:
Masters of the Universe box office:
- Domestic: $64,257,291 (57.6%)
- International: $47,388,342 (42.4%)
- Worldwide: $111,645,633
The movie needs around $400 million worldwide to break even, and the math simply isn’t there — it won’t get anywhere near a third of that number.
Amazon’s response has been to call the film “truly special”, which is studio-speak for changing the subject, and unsurprisingly a sequel is not set. Star Nicholas Galitzine, for his part, is already lining up his next movie.
Why it tanked isn’t a mystery. Mattel and Amazon tried to run the Barbie playbook on a male-skewing property, betting on a four-quadrant family comedy when the built-in audience wanted Conan with a Power Sword. The kids Amazon was banking on never showed up, and the fans who did show up got a punchline version of a property they take seriously. It’s the same quip-first formula Hollywood keeps paying the bill for.
The audience didn’t reject He-Man — it rejected this He-Man
That’s the real takeaway from Sekeris’ Instagram dump.
For fifteen years, multiple filmmakers understood the assignment: Goyer’s edgy take, the Nees’ grounded epic with a multi-film plan, designs that treat Skeletor like a threat instead of a bit.
The appetite for that movie is sitting right there in the comments under every post, where fans are begging for script details and a concept art book.
To his credit, Sekeris goes out of his way to praise Travis Knight’s film in every single post; the man is a consummate pro. But the work speaks for itself.
Sekeris says more art is coming, including material he’s been sitting on for years. We’ll be watching.
