Amazon has spent the last few years insisting it’s serious about theatrical, and to be fair, it has occasionally backed that up. The $8.5 billion MGM purchase, the Bond stewardship, and a stated ambition to put a dozen-plus movies a year in cinemas all pointed toward a studio that wanted to be a real player.
The issue is that some of Amazon MGM’s biggest bets have made that pitch harder to fully buy into, and no bet looked bigger in 2026 than Masters of the Universe. The roughly $200 million He-Man reboot from Mattel, at least for now, may go down as one of the year’s more widely discussed disappointments. This past weekend delivered a fresh indignity that’s hard to spin, as a seven-year-old Marvel movie nearly matched the He-Man epic’s entire opening weekend.
Avengers: Endgame Encore Nearly Matched Masters of the Universe’s Opening Weekend
Avengers: Endgame Encore, Disney’s re-release of the 2019 blockbuster with added end-credits material setting the table for December’s Avengers: Doomsday, led the domestic box office with $26 million. Masters of the Universe, by comparison, opened to $29.3 million back in June, according to Box Office Mojo, meaning the gap between the two was only about $3 million. That is not an especially flattering comparison for a brand-new tentpole reportedly built at a far greater cost than a re-release would require.
Internationally, Encore added another $60 million for an $86 million global start, placing it among the more notable re-release launches and lifting Endgame’s lifetime total to $2.885 billion, or roughly $39 million shy of Avatar. Masters of the Universe, meanwhile, finished with about $114 million worldwide, which appears unlikely to meaningfully offset a production budget of that size, especially before marketing is taken into account.
Amazon MGM’s Theatrical Pitch Looks Weaker After ‘Masters of the Universe’
The film itself was reasonably well liked, with critics praising Travis Knight’s direction and Jared Leto’s swing at Skeletor, and it holds a decent 68% on Rotten Tomatoes. But after the soft debut and a brutal 70% second-weekend drop, Amazon MGM distribution chief Kevin Wilson offered a statement that raised more eyebrows than it calmed, saying:
“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.” (via Variety)
That said, the comparison is a little unfair, since Endgame arrives with a decade of accumulated goodwill and a Doomsday marketing hook, and re-releases are famously cheap wins. Disney’s rerun benefited from over 1,300 premium-format screens and a fanbase primed by Spider-Man: Brand New Day‘s enormous year.
