Before Travis Knight took over as director of a new take on Masters of the Universe for Amazon MGM, the Nee Brothers were set to helm an earlier incarnation of the movie at Sony Pictures.
Black Adam and Street Fighter star Noah Centineo had been cast as Prince Adam/He-Man in this version, but stepped away prior to the project being picked up at MGM, with Nicholas Galitzine taking over as Eternia's muscle-bound protector.
Now, Centineo has revealed that he came very close to shooting the movie (he even tried on the costume), and explained why he ultimately decided not to stick around for what sounds like a significantly different take on the material.
"For a moment there, I was – I guess we can talk about this – was going to do He-Man,” Centineo told host Josh Horowitz during an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “There was He-Man before Black Adam. And that didn’t [work out].”
“We were pretty close, dude,” he went on. “I went through the test process. We screen tested loincloth and stuff. All of it … I signed the contract. They’re like showing us, you know, previs. They’re showing us kind of the production design, the world building. At the time it was the Nee Brothers that were going to do it … and we got pretty close. And then, for some reason or another, it just pushed and pushed.”
Centineo recalled that the creative team “wanted to keep tweaking it and tweaking it and the contract ran out. And we moved on,” he said. “And then I think Netflix acquired it for a little bit, and then Amazon acquired it and they found [Nicholas Galitzine].”
Despite losing out on the role, Centineo was full of praise for Galitzine’s performance.
"It’s so difficult to step into a role like that dude. I mean, that’s not an easy movie to make at all. And like, I watched it and Nick is incredible. Like people don’t understand how hard it is to do camp wholeheartedly. If the movie works [or] the movie doesn’t work, oftentimes, especially in that situation, I don’t blame him for that. I loved what he was doing, what he was trying to do.”
MOTU was met with a mostly positive reception from critics, and fans of the classic cartoon seem to have embraced the colourful, comedic adaptation. Even so, the movie tanked at the box office, making a sequel unlikely.