So, who’s ghosting who here?
Jared Leto did not attend Monday’s “Masters of the Universe” premiere. Leto was not at the studio’s CinemaCon presentation. He is also isn’t booked for any interviews to promote the $175M movie. In fact, he hasn’t mentioned a thing, or posted a single message to his 11.4M followers on Instagram about “Masters of the Universe.”
Whether you like him or not, Leto is the biggest name in the “Masters of the Universe” cast, which stars Nicholas Galitzine — he plays Skeletor, the film’s villain, which Amazon/MGM paid him more than $5M for the role.
A source tells Puck that Leto “wasn’t thrilled” with the film, but I think there’s something more to this. Why wouldn’t Amazon be hiding Leto’s involvement? He’s become something of box-office poison in recent years.
It seems as though anything Leto is attached to struggles to find an audience: from “Morbius,” which flopped, to “House of Gucci,” which underperformed, to “Tron: Ares,” which bombed. His involvement doesn’t automatically doom a film, of course, but in a high-stakes, $200M blockbuster like “Masters of the Universe,” it’s yet another gamble Amazon clearly took seriously.
Ever since Leto won an Oscar for “Dallas Buyers Club,” it’s been slim pickings. He currently doesn’t have any projects set to go into production this year.
My favorite Leto story has to do with him spending 12 days on a meditation retreat in the desert in late February 2020 — totally isolated, with no phone and no communication — completely unaware that a global pandemic had shut everything down. When he returned, in March, discovering that the world had dramatically changed, he wrote, “Mind blown.”
The man doesn't stop. James Gunn has confirmed he's already hard at work writing his next film, even as ‘Man of Tomorrow’ makes its way toward theaters next summer.