In casting news that feels strangely perfect—on account of the ways he looks, talks, and acts—Variety reports this afternoon that actor Jared Leto has just been cast in the Masters Of The Universe movie as ambulatory skeleton dude/online life coach Skeletor. Leto will star opposite Nicholas Galitzine, who'll be playing He-Man in the film, based on the long-running toy franchise and/or weird trivia factoid on Frank Langella's IMDB page. We can only hope Leto has learned from the blowback that accompanied his last tenure as an IP supervillain, and won't start sending his castmates (which also include Alison Brie, Idris Elba, and Camila Mendes), like, big boxes of bones to help himself get into the part.
In addition to Leto, Variety also announced a sort of henchman round-up, with Sam C. Wilson, Kojo Attah, and Hafthor Bjornsson—all of whom have given performances we'd classify under the general label of "big, dangerous motherfuckers" in projects like House Of The Dragon, The Beekeeper, and Game Of Thrones—as Trap-Jaw, Tri-Klops, and Goat Man, respectively. (Not gonna lie: The part of us that enjoys very goofy shit is pretty excited for a cinematic Tri-Klops.) Masters Of The Universe is being directed by Travis Knight, the Bumblebee director who's also the CEO of stop-motion animation studio Laika.
Leto has had a couple of pretty questionable years of it lately; he appeared in recent projects like the Haunted Mansion movie and AppleTV+'s WeCrashed, but had his brand get pretty badly warped by a couple of poorly received comic book movie performances, first as The Joker in the now-discontinued D.C. Comics movies, and then as "living vampire" Morbius in the now-discontinued Sony Spider-villains movies. That's a lot of "now-discontinued" for one filmography; we'll be waiting to see if third time's the charm as he takes on this evil skellington man role.
