It looks like Bumblebee’s Travis Knight will direct a Masters Of The Universe movie

For some reason, a second live-action Masters Of The Universe movie (that’s the thing He-Man is from) has been one of Hollywood’s greatest, most sought-after white whales. It’s not that the appeal of such an idea is inexplicable—it’s a famous franchise with established characters in an era where that’s still pretty priceless—it’s that nobody can seem to actually get the thing made. Just in the last decade, McG was attached to one version, David S. Goyer was working on a version, and recently Netflix tried to throw some money at the concept (to no avail). But where every other person in Hollywood has failed, perhaps Travis Knight can succeed?

Knight has already done the seemingly impossible once before, making a live-action Transformers movie that was pretty good (2018’s Bumblebee), and that alone also suggests that he at least has some affinity for this kind of… you know, nerdy thing. According to Deadline, Knight is the “top choice” to make this new Masters Of The Universe, and he’s currently in “final negotiations” for the gig.

Apparently, though Knight was one of the favorites “for some time,” it was some kind of “in-person presentation” he made last week that really “sealed the deal.” We don’t know anything about this presentation, but he is the president of stop-motion studio Laika (the folks behind Coraline), so he’d probably be good at acting things out with real He-Man figures.

As for Masters Of The Universe, it began as a Mattel toy line with medieval type warrior characters in space, but—much like with The Transformers—it exploded in popularity thanks to the He-Man cartoon. The sword-swingin’, loincloth-wearin’ He-Man is the main guy, with the villain being a skeleton-faced sorcerer named Skeletor. In the poorly received 1987 live-action movie, Dolph Lundgren played He-Man and Frank Langella played Skeletor.