Even though Arnold Schwarzenegger is at the ripe ol’ age of 69, he’s still very much a busy actor. Indeed, the Austrian-American superstar has been toiling away at this year’s highly anticipated Terminator: Dark Fate. The sequel finally sees him reuniting with both veteran filmmaker James Cameron, and his former co-star Linda Hamilton. However, that’s not to say that he’s finished with all his other iconic franchises. Case in point: the Conan The Barbarian series.
That’s right, Arnie has allegedly been trying his best to get a sequel to 1982’s Conan The Barbarian and 1984’s Conan The Destroyer off the ground. Back in 2016, The Austrian Oak insisted that a script had already been written. The project was tentatively named The Legend Of Conan or Conan The Conqueror and would see the Hollywood A-lister, “sitting on the throne for years and years – decades, and then all of the sudden, the time comes when they want to overthrow me.” Suffice it to say, production of the movie sadly never took off.
In a recent interview with The Arnold Fans, Schwarzenegger outlined why he thinks that the project hasn’t come to fruition, explaining:
When it comes to the movie, the sad stuff about all of this is when there’s an estate… The Robert E. Howard estate… when someone buys these rights, those people now own the rights and they have their own vision of what they want to do. The guy that has the rights is some young guy and he’s trying to figure out how to get his way through Hollywood and this is not easy to do. So there are people that say to him, ‘Why don’t you start with a TV series?’ and then he negotiates for a TV series and that falls apart. Then he goes maybe to Netflix and that falls apart. Then he decides to make a movie maybe.
We have been trying to convince him for years now that the way to go is to come back and hire a really great director, do another Conan movie and have me play King Conan, when Conan is like 70 years old. He’s disgusted by sitting on the throne and being the king and then something happens after that. It’s really not that far from creating a finished script. The only one who really has to pull the trigger there is the people who own the Conan rights to do a movie. Let’s go to Netflix or whoever it is, let’s hire a director who’s very creative and can elevate the project to make it a winning project. I hope it will be done very soon because I think it’s a great idea.
Essentially, the creative control of the iconic fantasy franchise is out of Arnie’s hands and the Conan intellectual property is instead owned by somebody else in Hollywood. But the fact that Schwarzenegger’s interested in the project is enough to give fans a little hope of some kind of a revival.
Clearly, if The Governator deems that a sequel’s worth pursuing, there surely must’ve been something special about the early scripts, right? Plus, Arnie could well be onto something in regards to Netflix snapping up a fantasy series like Conan. Just look at how uber-popular Game Of Thrones is right now. Sure, HBO’s award-winning fantasy epic may not be a Netflix show, but with its final season looming ever closer, there’ll without doubt be a dragon-sized hole in everyone’s hearts that’ll need filling after those final credits roll.
But how about you? Would you be interested in seeing a modern sequel to the classic Conan The Barbarian series? Or would you rather see them make a TV show? Do let us know in the usual place.