Marvel and Mattel revive childhood heroes with 2026 releases

Marvel and Mattel are betting on childhood memory in very different ways this year. One revival extends an already-loved world into new time periods and new political anxieties. The other puts a familiar name back on the big screen, hoping brand recognition alone can carry He-Man back to theaters.

Masters of the Universe opened in theaters June 5, with Amazon MGM Studios and Mattel Studios backing a live-action He-Man movie directed by Travis Knight and starring Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Adam and He-Man. Mattel has said the franchise began in 1982 with a line of action figures, and the new film is being sold as a return to those roots. That pedigree matters, but the project is also being kept tightly under wraps, with plot details still largely hidden as the studio leans on a title that generations already know.

X-Men ’97 has taken a different path. Season 2 is set to premiere on Disney+ on July 1, and Marvel’s own description makes clear that the series is not treating the X-Men like a blank slate. The team is divided and scattered across different eras in time, with Charles Xavier’s mutants trying to find their way home while suspicious foes and new strains of mutant intolerance rise in the 1990s without them. Marvel says the new season stretches across an ancient past, the present, and a distant future, a structure that signals continuation rather than reboot.

That difference is the real nostalgia playbook. X-Men ’97 works because it preserves the emotional rhythm, political unease, and serialized momentum that made the original animated series matter in the first place, then pushes that world forward instead of sanding it down for a generic modern relaunch. The show’s first season premiered March 20, 2024, and the second arrives a little more than two years later, close enough to the original era to feel connected, far enough away to show that the revival has its own engine.

Studios trying to revive childhood franchises for adult audiences need more than a recognizable logo. They need continuity of tone, a story that respects what made the original feel urgent, and a creative premise that adds to the mythology instead of merely borrowing it. Marvel’s mutants are returning with time fractures, ideological tension, and the same sense of danger that defined their world. Mattel’s He-Man is back in live-action, but the harder test will be whether a famous name can become a living story again.