Make it exploitive and over-the-top, and it will be a hit.

By the way, there was a nice story about the slimebag over at CHUD, by the way - about him being a pathetic asshole in a video rental and then getting told "ah, the good version of Red Dragon?" when he ordered them to bring him a copy of "Manhunter"...

oh well, that now gives them time and money to make the hotly anticipated live action adaptation of Sectaurs!

We can dream.

Well made Fantasy movies bring in the dough, well made superhero movies bring in the dough. That's two possible doughs!

It occurs to me : the difference between today and early 80s filmmaking is the genre movies have become the tentpole movies and the former tentpoles are now jammed into the arthouse ghetto - the Sony Picture Classics - Fox Searchlight niche. He-Man, even at the height of his popularity (and as everyone knows was simply a pg version of Conan to begin with) would have been a low to low-medium budgeted movie in the early 80s. Do you think Joel Silver was looking to make He-Man on a 40 mil or lower budget? I don't...

Even if WB had kept a reign on 'leaks'like this, the would never have had the temerity to actually commit to a project where there is NO WAY OF UNGAYIFYING THE NAMES OF THE TWO CENTRAL CHARACTERS.

That being said, I still think the original MOTU movie is better than Bay-Formers! If only for Langella as Skeletor! I prefer my villians to have more than 10 words of dialogue and 8 minutes of screen time.

But seriously, either Ratner, a Wchowksi of some description or a Zack Snyder could do this justice. But really- it should be John Milius. I mean, he's into this uber-man stuff isn't he? And the lead character is called fucking HE-MAN, isn't he? A match made in heaven.

John Milius to make MOTU! MAKE IT SOOOOO!

The complete opposite would be something like Superman Returns, where so much money was being spent and so much hype and history surrounded it, that I'm sure they were getting notes on EVERYTHING from every executive and toy manufacturer who had even the smallest stake in its success.

Even today, when you look at the circumstances on how LOTR was made, it really was way under the radar and the effects were practically improvised. Of course, Return went on to sweep the Oscars, but I think a case can be made for the way Fellowship was made (still the best one, imho) and released that should allow other comparable movies to be made under similar circumstances for low budgets by people with a vision and the ability to pull artists together who may have not had a chance to work on a movie otherwise.

If the studio REALLY felt they were shouldering too much risk, they would have demanded that ILM be doing the effects and they would have had lawyers and line producers all over that set.

All this isn't to say that it should be done in the service of a He-Man movie, but I think it does point out a recent example of something that probably WAS done more in the vein of an 80's fantasy/sci-fi movie, where entire conglomerates didn't have their nose in the production's business the whole time and various effects people got to ply their trade and make things cheap but effective.

And one more supremely important ingredient that I've noticed is a director who has an idea of how THEY want the effects done. This is as true of Peter Jackson on LOTR as it was of Ridley Scott on Alien and Blade Runner. I think Nolan is the same way on his films, knowing and working out ahead of time how certain things should be done, rather than just deferring everything to CGI and effects artists supervisors. This often leads to a more 'completeness' of the effects, if that makes any sense, where many different avenues are pursued to make up the whole, many of which are often very cheap but also very effective.