Every so often a project has the masses greatly excited and then BOOM, its progress is shut down and the project is killed. This is apparently what has happened to the new He-Man project that was being developed at Warner Bros. called Grayskull: Masters of the Universe.

All this comes as a shock because not too long ago, Latino Review — who also broke this bad news — was able to read the script by Justin Marks and absolute raved about it. From the description of the opening sequences, I and many others were also incredibly excited about how it was sounding. It looks like WB just was never really big on the project to begin with and probably had nightmares of Dolph Lundgren and Courteney Cox haunting them non-stop.

Aside from nightmares, the two huge guillotines were this: WB had a list of directors they wanted, including Bryan Singer and Doug Liman, both of whom passed it up. Also, the main man who brought Grayskull to Warner, Navid McIIhargey, actually left for New Regency, which is a good way to get a project snuffed out.

It looks like Mattel is very much pissed at the way this has all played out, which makes sense. Even if a terrible He-Man movie was made, Mattel can make products and money off of it. They’re asking WB to release the rights so that they can take the project somewhere it will actually get done (New Regency?) and make them a happy little toy company.

At the moment there’s a few scenarios: Warner Bros. remains stubborn and keeps the project both to themselves AND dead; Warner Bros. realizes the potential eventually and resurrects it; or they sell away their rights so that someone else can try and make it happen (possibly leading to a Watchmen-like lawsuit).

As far as I’m concerned, this is just the business and we can only hope that it works out at some point so we can see this one.