It’s been fifteen years since the Jason Momoa-led Conan the Barbarian (review here) bombed at the box office, but now we may have some good news about the future of the franchise. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who played author Robert E. Howard’s iconic warrior in three ’80s movies (Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Destroyer, and Red Sonja), told TheArnoldFans at the Arnold Sports Festival, that a huge name is on board to bring him back to the big screen.
“They just hired a fantastic writer/director who did Tom Cruise’s last four movies,” says Schwarenegger. “They just hired him [Christopher McQuarrie] to write and direct ‘King Conan’…”Now, what they do is that they write the part. They don’t write them like I’m forty years old; you write it to be age-appropriate. I’ll still go in there and kick some ass, but it will be different…With ‘King Conan,’ it’s a great old story that Conan was forty years as King, and now he gets forced out of the kingdom, and there’s conflict, of course, but somehow he comes back, and there’s all kinds of madness, violence, magic, and creatures, and stuff like that. And now, of course, there’s all kinds of special effects. The studio has plenty of money to make those movies really big, so I’m looking forward to all of those projects.”
This sounds fishy to me. McQuarrie doing swords ‘n sorcery stuff? Doesn’t seem like the right fit for the Mission: Impossible filmmaker, but who knows? I’m skeptical also because there have been loads of Conan projects that have been pitched, but nearly all have died on the vine. King Conan has been talked about since the ’80s, for instance.
Schwarzenegger also teased sequels to two more of his biggest career films, Predator and Commando.
“They did an additional ‘Predator,’ and the director [Dan Trachtenberg] has been doing a great job of that…Now, he wants me to be in the next ‘Predator.’ We’ve talked about it. As a matter of fact, FOX studios has kind of rediscovered ‘Arnold.’ They’ve come to me and said, ‘We want you to do ‘Predator,’ we just got a script for you to do ‘Commando 2.’”
Again, this sounds sketchy as Hell. Sometimes, actors like to toot their own horn, send a hanging curveball out there to see if fans will knock it out of the park. In short, these sound like trial balloons.
To be fair, Schwarzenegger’s Dutch Schaefer did show up as a captive of the Yautja in Trachtenberg’s animated Predator: Killer of Killers film. So there COULD be a continuation for him after that. But it still seems unlikely. Plans for him to return have been brewing since Predator 2, and have never materialized.
And as for Commando, a sequel to Arnold’s kick-ass 1985 action classic seems like a stretch, but I’m down for it. You can watch the video I made celebrating it below, courtesy of my pals at Joblo.
