‘Masters of the Universe’ Was a Box Office Bomb, But It’s a Monster Hit on Prime Video

I told you guys not to give up on Masters of the Universe.

When Travis Knight’s live-action He-Man movie stumbled at the box office earlier this summer, the knives came out pretty quickly. And look, there was no way around the numbers. The movie cost a reported $170 million to $200 million before marketing and finished with only around $113 million worldwide. That’s a financial disaster for a movie that expensive.

But I argued at the time that the theatrical box office might not tell the entire story.

This is an Amazon MGM movie. Prime Video was always waiting for it at the end of its theatrical run, and audiences aren’t stupid. We’ve spent years training people to understand that if they wait long enough, that big movie they skipped in theaters will show up on a streaming service they’re already paying for.

In the case of Masters of the Universe, they barely even had to wait.

The movie opened theatrically on June 5 and landed on Prime Video on July 22, just 47 days later.

And holy shit, people showed up.

According to Nielsen’s newly released streaming rankings for July 20-26, Masters of the Universe was the most-watched streaming title in America, generating a whopping 1.17 BILLION minutes viewed after arriving on Prime Video.

Here’s the easiest way to put that number into perspective.

The movie runs a little over two hours. 1.17 billion minutes is roughly equivalent to millions upon millions of complete viewings of the movie in five days.

Don’t mistake that for millions of individual people buying tickets. Nielsen is measuring viewing time, which includes partial watches and rewatches. But whichever way you slice it, the takeaway is the same:

A massive audience wanted to watch Masters of the Universe. They just didn’t necessarily want to pay to see it in a theater.

Which brings me back to what I said when everyone was declaring the franchise dead: I don’t think He-Man is going anywhere.