I enjoyed the film as dumb popcorn fodder.

On the ending subject of IP franchise fatigue, the end credits upset me a little with its sequel baiting. It reminded me a bit of Ryan Reynold’s Green Lantern where the movie’s ending told you the plotline that they would have rather done and left a lot of questions of “why didn’t you just make that
movie instead?”

All of He-Man’s deepest worldbuilding was in spin off She-Ra. There’s definitely a gender joke there that 10 year old boys didn’t care if the world lore of the toyline made sense or had any real depth but 10 year girls did.

It’s also a weird artifact of TV writers being at weird places in their lives. JMS (John Michael Stracynski) best known now for Babylon 5 is still credited as the creator of She-Ra for being in the lucky position to be head writer on the spin-off at an early career point.

So yeah I came out of the movie feeling like the team signaled that they really wished they were making a She-Ra movie and both Amazon and Mattel told them they had to do a He-Man movie first because she’s just “the spin-off”. (Despite the Netflix show making it abundantly clear that she can hold attentions for an entire series arc with no direct involvement of He-Man.)

But also it does say some things about me that I care way more about She-Ra than He-Man and could just be projecting that on the ending which may have easily just been Mattel and Amazon requiring Avengers-style sequel bait.