GoC was invited to Elstree Studios in London for the Masters of the Universe set visit, to the room where the people actually building Eternia were working. I flew out, walked the soundstages, sat with the producer, the production designer, the props master, and the costume designer, and then took the trip home knowing I was sitting on a year of coverage.
What follows is everything we learned on the Masters of the Universe set visit, paired with what Travis Knight told a small group of us at the Amazon MGM early press experience in Las Vegas this April. No spoilers. No film verdict. Just the room.
Quick answer: The Masters of the Universe set visit took place in May 2025 at Elstree and Borehamwood, the same UK lot that housed Star Wars and Indiana Jones. Travis Knight directed. Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas (Inception, Superman Returns) built Eternia from sketch to soundstage.
The film hits theaters on June 5, 2026.
Travis Knight’s vision for Masters of the Universe
Travis Knight’s pitch is simple. Be faithful to the toys, the comics, and the Filmation cartoon, then film it like it deserves to exist.
“Whenever we were at some kind of crossroads, we just go back to the source,” Knight said during the Vegas roundtable. “There are a lot of nods. The color palette. Actually, when Adam transforms for the first time, we see the spirit of Grayskull right behind him. It’s kind of a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, but it’s there. I think that level of devotion to the original source material is something you’ll find all throughout the whole movie.”
Knight is 46. Castle Grayskull was, in his words, “The greatest kid Christmas gift I ever received.” He compared it to the Red Ryder BB gun from A Christmas Story. Every conversation he had with department heads pulled back to that frame. Find what made this special. Do not be embarrassed by it.
He was direct about the 1987 Cannon Films live-action movie.
“As a kid, what disappointed me about that movie was that it was not my He-Man,” Knight said. “That was not the thing I loved. It’s an incredibly entertaining film, and I have a lot of affection for it. But there was not a blueprint to adopt or avoid for me as far as that was concerned. I always go back to the source.”
On set, that source-first instinct showed up in moments his department heads kept circling back to. The day Nicholas Galitzine recited the He-Man incantation for the first time, Knight said he had chills.
Galitzine, in the trio roundtable, told us he chose to walk in cold: “I didn’t want to have something so prepared in my mind. I wanted it to feel free from my core and my gut.”
That is the through-line. Knight cast actors who could do action, comedy, and emotional weight in the same scene. Then he built a band around them. Camila Mendes opposite Galitzine. Idris Elba as Duncan. Jared Leto as Skeletor. Morena Baccarin as the Sorceress, cast in part because, as Knight put it, “I wanted to make sure that Morena and Cami look like they could possibly be related, and they do.”
The Eternia Guy Hendrix Dyas built
Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas opened his sketchbook for us in the design office on day 66 of shooting.
Dyas is a quiet flex of a hire. His credits include Inception, Superman Returns, and Elizabeth: The Golden Age. He is also, as he told the room, one of the kids who actually grew up watching Masters of the Universe in the UK.
“I grew up in Devon, and my kid sister and I used to run home two miles up a hill, to a farm where I grew up, to tune into Masters of the Universe,” Dyas said. “And we watched it. We absolutely loved it.”
What that fandom looks like in practice: pages and pages of original concept sketches for Grayskull alone. A top view nobody had ever drawn. A back view. The drawbridge mechanism. The rotunda statues, carved from a single stone in the center of a waterfall, were lifted by a map-fold trick he first used on Elizabeth: The Golden Age. The amphitheatre wrapped in glass, the bridge spanning out to the palace, like, in his words, “A wonderful umbilical cord between all of these places.”
The “aha” moment for Dyas was Snake Mountain.
“For those that have seen the animation, every now and then, Skeletor would go out into the mouth of the snake at the top of Snake Mountain, onto the tongue, and he will stand there, usually with Evil-Lyn and one other evil character, and they’ll have some kind of dialogue,” he said. “And it was such a cool image, and it’s one that Travis and I kept coming back to in our conversations. And when I saw that he’d written it into the script, I thought, ‘Oh my God, we have to do this.’ So we ended up actually building the mouth and the tongue and actually having him go out there.”
Dyas also confirmed something the trailer can only hint at. The vast majority of the film takes place on Eternia.
“Very little time is actually spent on Earth,” he said. “It’s an important grounding for us, and there’s a reason why we did it, but you’ll see when you watch the movie. The moments on Earth give great context to everything that happens for the rest of the film. But we actually don’t spend much time on Earth.”
Asked about working in a vibrant color palette after a career of stylized realism, Dyas brought up Chris Nolan unprompted. “I was the one that got the Inception job,” he said. “At the end of it, Chris, who’s a man of few words, said to me, ‘Thank you for bringing color to my films.'”
He also brought up Brandon Routh from his Superman Returns days as a frame of reference for Galitzine’s transformation.
“Brandon didn’t do the work that this guy does,” Dyas said. “I’ll be having a conversation with him, and I’ll sort of go, ‘Are you working out right now?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah.’ He continually works, and it’s stunning. That is massive commitment.”
The arsenal: inside the props department
Two doors down from the design office, the props team had every hero weapon in the film laid out on a long table. The Sword of Power was the first piece they handed me.
“It stayed true to the historical sword from when we were concepting and working with Travis and Guy to achieve what they wanted to see on camera,” property master Steven Morris said. “We made many iterations of this for the movie based on the action and things like that. We’ve got ones that have handles that are different lengths for fighting. We’ve got sort of shorter blades, lightweight versions, super soft versions, a broken sword which is a beat in the script that gets used.”
The whole arsenal got the same iterative treatment. Skeletor’s Havoc Staff has lights built into the body, desk-operated by the on-set electrical team, so the eyes flash on camera. Evil-Lyn’s Magic Orb uses crystallized chips to catch light. Goat Man’s three-foot axe was a late add.
“At the start, he wasn’t going to have a weapon,” Morris said, “but it was built in one of the pre-visits from the stunt team. They said, ‘Oh, can we have an axe?’ So we made an axe that was three feet tall.”
Idris Elba’s Duncan is fully kitted out. Boot knife, sidearm, big mace, a blade that pops out of his vambrace, grenades, and a blast rifle. The blast rifle was bench-made by one of the workshop guys without a formal design brief: “It just kind of grew and grew, got layers and layers of detail, and became this big blaster gun.”
Trapjaw’s transforming arm is the kind of practical effect Travis Knight built his name on at LAIKA and on Bumblebee.
“He’s got a transformation from blade to muzzle gun to hook,” Morris said. “And there’s a beat in the fight where his arm gets ripped off his gun, and it’s used to, you know, shoot his own head.”
That last beat is one of the bits I have replayed in my head since.
Knight, asked about it in Vegas, was blunt: “I’m not gonna lie. When I had conversations with my designers about the transformation of Trap Jaw’s arm, the Swiss army thing, there was a way to do it that felt like nanotech. There was no f—ing way I was going to do nanotech. It was going to be a physical thing that actually transforms like they do in the Transformers movies.”
Triclops’s scythe was hand-pattern-made from scratch.
Morris said, “We’ve got a guy in the workshop called Paul Marsh, and he’s a genius with his hands, purely with his hands. There’s no digital, no computer, no CAD work involved.” There is also a full Eternian language alphabet etched into the swords. If you know, you know.
There is a Mattel toy-line clearance loop baked into the process.
“We’ve got a lady in the team who basically, when we get to a design level where everyone’s happy, it will be submitted for clearance,” Morris said. “Everybody from Mattel to Amazon and all the guys that need to know were involved in that.”
The costumes: no furry underwear, no zippers
Costume designer Richard Sale’s office was the longest stop on the tour and the funniest. The single biggest creative call was what to do about He-Man’s pants.
“You can tell our major goal was to try and be true to the original,” they said. “We went through like eighty variations of trousers. Is he wearing trousers? Is he wearing armor on top? You keep looking, and you’re going, ‘Well, it’s not quite He-Man.’ The fur on the whole was kind of nixed quite early on. The furry pants would have been just too difficult. Although, to be absolutely fair, we did tease Nick at one point saying that he was going to be wearing that.”
Where they landed: a leather gladiator skirt. Travis Knight, in Vegas, framed the same choice. “He’s got a gladiator skirt instead of the furry knickers. Same silhouette, but with a different prism attached to it.”
The costume team gave full credit to Pedro Pascal and Paul Mescal for making the call easier. “Thankfully, Gladiator came out and the people that were going, ‘Maybe you should be wearing trousers,’ kind of shut up once Pedro Pascal and Paul Mescal had made gladiator skirts sexy again.”
Adam’s costume took the longest to lock. Not because of the silhouette, but because Galitzine’s body kept changing through prep.
“We didn’t actually finalize the shape and the size of it until the week before he shot, because his body is changing,” Sale said. “And then you’ll have the whole nipples-in, nipples-out Batman thing.”
A few finer details they were proudest of. There is a snake skull hidden in Skeletor’s snake jewel that you will not see unless you are pausing the frame. Man-at-Arms’s armor is copper, not orange.
“We were like, ‘What metal is this?’ So we settled on copper, which gives us the same tone, but it also gives us something to age into. All of that patina, all of that verdigris allows us to tell a richer story,” Sale said.
For Morena Baccarin’s Sorceress, the team rejected the original bird-feather look outright.
“From a filming point of view, I had a real problem with that, because you don’t want these two big dead cold eyes staring out at you right above Morena’s beautiful face.”
They went with sunray pleating cribbed from ancient Egyptian silhouettes and a feather collar designed by a specialist textile artist: “The first time I talked to Morena, and she saw the design, she was like, ‘Oh, thank God I’m not wearing like a onesie.'”
There is a no-zippers rule across the board. It is the same rule Sale applied on Guardians of the Galaxy. Any closure on screen has to be a stud, a buckle, or something that does not pull an audience out of Eternia and back to Earth.
Then there is the bigger creative call running underneath the entire wardrobe. The Sorceress is timeless. Skeletor leans snake, not bone, because too much bone made him a mirror image of Adam. He-Man’s costume reads as an ancient object somebody else used to wear.
“It’s an ancient costume,” Sale said. “We don’t know how many people have worn it before him. Hopefully they’ve washed it.”
The mission statement landed in the closer. “He-Man is, yes, his body, but he’s an attitude. It’s a state of mind as well as a state of body.”
What surprised us most on the Masters of the Universe set visit
A few things hit harder than I expected. The first was how much trust Travis Knight has placed in his department heads.
Producer Jason Blumenthal walked us into the design office and got out of the way. “The real artisans of this movie need to kind of speak,” Blumenthal said.
Dyas described his role as “really Travis’s sidekick.” Sale talked about Travis as a director who picks a lane and trusts you to drive.
The second was how often the source material outranked ego.
“Almost as though they didn’t like it, and were embarrassed about it,” Dyas said about past attempts to make He-Man look like The Matrix. “What was really lovely is I felt a spark when Travis and I started talking about it, because neither of us felt that there was anything to hide here.”
The third was Goat Man, of all characters.
“Goat Man was a very, very minor character in the original drafts that Chris and Travis had written,” Dyas said. “After I showed them the design with this hulking great thing with this bizarre tribal makeup, they went, ‘Okay, we need to write some more scenes for him.’ So he gets a very big role in this film, which will be quite surprising to fans.”
The fourth, and the one I keep coming back to, was Travis Knight’s read on the bigger conversation he wanted the film to start.
“What does it mean to be a man?” he asked us in Vegas. “Eternia for me essentially represents ’80s masculinity. But Adam grows up in modern America, which has a very different form of masculine. More about empathy, understanding, and communication. How do those things smash into each other, and what happens when they do?”
This is not the 1987 Masters of the Universe movie. It is not a Saturday-morning cartoon either. From what we saw on the Masters of the Universe set visit, it is something the people building it actually care about.
Masters of the Universe release date: where and when to watch
Masters of the Universe releases in theaters on June 5, 2026, from Amazon MGM Studios.
Nicholas Galitzine stars as Prince Adam / He-Man, with Camila Mendes as Teela, Idris Elba as Duncan / Man-at-Arms, Jared Leto as Skeletor, Morena Baccarin as the Sorceress, Alison Brie, James Purefoy, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson as Fisto, Jon Xue Zhang as Ram-Man, James Wilkinson as Mekanek, Charlotte Riley, and Kristen Wiig as the voice of Roboto.
Travis Knight directs from a screenplay by Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee, and Dave Callaham, based on the Mattel property.
GoC’s Masters of the Universe coverage continues this week with our Travis Knight roundtable interview, our Camila Mendes interview on playing Teela, and dedicated breakouts on Guy Hendrix Dyas’s production design, the props department, and the costume team.
Masters of the Universe is in theaters June 5, 2026.