Sony Pictures is still trying to make a Masters of the Universe movie despite a decade of development hell. The power of brand recognition is strong in Hollywood, and the studio has their eyes on making a fantasy action blockbuster franchise out of the popular He-Man toyline and cartoon. However, the vision that writer/director David S. Goyer had was too expensive for Sony to bring to life, and one of the creature designers hired to work on that iteration of Masters of the Universe has recently teased some details about what we’ll be missing out on.

Carlos Huante is a creature designer and former artist at Industrial Light and Magic. He’s worked on films like Men in Black, War of the Worlds, Prometheus and more. Coincidentally enough, before he got into creature design and visual effects, Huante worked as a runner at Filmation on the original He-Man cartoon series. And then he was enlisted to help make David S. Goyer’s Masters of the Universe happen. Unfortunately, it sounds like we won’t get to see the full force of what Goyer intended to make.

Huante sat down with HN Entertainment to briefly discuss the Masters of the Universe project he left behind once Goyer walked away from the project. He was working behind the scenes for several weeks on the film and thought the script was really good, “This one was fun and it made the world more fantastic than I thought it could go. It felt arty and fantastical at the same time.”

And the scale of the project sounds like it would have been truly epic. Huante explained:

“I’m not going to talk too much about it, I know they’re making it still. But I’ll tell you it was… just the story of Greyskull and that sort of thing and there was some really cool stuff in there. I don’t think they’re gonna make that version. I know they’re not going to. It was like a Lord of The Rings film, it was huge! And there was all kinds of stuff in there, you could have divided up that script into three movies and it would have worked. That’s how big it was.”

It’s easy to shoot for the moon and compare the vision of a prospective project to Lord of the Rings, but Huante clarified a little bit:

“It was a more fantastic version of Lord of The Rings, is what I’ll say. It’s a more colorful and fantastical version of Lord of The Rings, but it felt as real as Lord of The Rings. It was very real but very far-out. It was a final return to science fiction fantasy where we’ve only had one: Star Wars.”

It’s hard to tell whether David S. Goyer would have been able to pull off something that Huante clearly built up in his mind as something amazingly epic. After all, Lord of the Rings was a miracle of a project, a once in a lifetime kind of fantasy epic. Those kinds of projects are difficult to realize on screen in a satisfying way, no matter how grand a filmmaker’s vision may be, which is probably one of the reasons Sony Pictures has had such a difficult time getting it off the ground.

Adam and Aaron Nee, who helmed the quirky indie flick Band of Robbers, have been hired to direct the current version. They’ll be working from a script that is being polished by Iron Man writers Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, so maybe some of Goyer’s ideas will still make it to the big screen.