Most of the news these days coming out of Sony Pictures has been about the recent hack, or related to plans for the Spider-Man franchise (or, more realistically, the non-plans for Spidey) but now we have our first news about a property we haven’t heard about in a while: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. DeVon Franklin, Sony’s Senior VP of Production, confirmed, via Twitter, that an all new Masters of the Universe screenplay draft has been finished and turned in by writer/director Jeff Wadlow (Kick-Ass 2). Considering they decided to show off the script to the public, there’s a good chance they at least liked it enough to probably go into pre-production; I can’t imagine the powers that be at Sony would have tweeted it out if they thought it was awful.

@danmillerNY @RoastGooble pic.twitter.com/a9whbCChXl

— DeVon Franklin (@DeVonFranklin) January 2, 2015

So what do we know about Sony’s potential He-Man movie? Actually, if Jeff Wadlow’s version is the one we see, we actually know quite a bit. Not too long ago, Wadlow appeared on a podcast on Masters of the Universe fan site He-Man.org, and went into great detail about his love for the property that he grew up with. He described his pitch to the studio in which he brought in the original 1982 Wave-1 set of action figures and explained how he realized he wanted to be a film director by playing with the old Masters toys as a kid, and that “his whole life had been building to that moment.” Whether or not Wadlow delivers a good movie or not is in the stars, but there is no doubt that he has an intense love for this property going all the way back to his childhood. Probably more than Michael Bay loved Transformers in any case.

Masters of the Universe was one of the biggest toy properties of the 1980s, along with Transformers and GI Joe. While the latter two have found success on the big screen, He-Man and company have remained in perpetual development hell. But with Spider-Man in limbo right now, Sony could use another big sci-fantasy franchise to take its place, and maybe He-Man and Skeletor or the ones to do it.

[HT: DeVon Franklin via He-Man.org]