Legendary action movie star–and former California governator–Arnold Schwarzenegger has revealed that he’s in talks to reprise several of his signature roles for new Conan the Barbarian, Predator, and Commando movies.
“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,” Schwarzenegger said at this year’s Arnold Sports Festival (via Variety). “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.'”
Schwarzenegger also commented on the long-in-development King Conan, which will be helmed by Christopher McQuarrie, the director behind the last four Mission Impossible movies. “It’s a great story where Conan was 40 years king [as] king and he gets complacent, and now he gets forced out of the kingdom, slowly,” Schwarzenegger said (via THR). Then there’s conflict, of course, and then he somehow comes back, and then there’s all kinds of madness and violence and magic and creatures.”
Conan the Barbarian turned Schwarzenegger into a star when it was first released in 1982, and in 1984, the sequel Conan the Destroyer was released. Aside from a 2011 remake starring Jason Momoa as the character, the film franchise has remained dormant while the King Conan project has been stuck in development hell. Legacy sequels are currently all the rage in Hollywood, as the last couple of years have seen sequels to classic film franchises like Top Gun, Twister, Freaky Friday, and I Know What You Did Last Summer.
In the Predator franchise, Predator: Hunting Grounds explained what happened to Alan “Dutch” Schaefer after his first run-in with the intergalactic hunter. In a series of tape recordings–featuring Schwarzenegger’s voice–Schaefer revealed that he eventually began to lure and hunt Predators on Earth, using their technology and eventually undergoing an experimental treatment to bond his DNA with that of a Yautja so that he could remain physically fit in his advanced age.
Schwarzenegger’s potential return as Schaefer was teased in Trachtenberg’s animated film Predator: Killer of Killers, leaving the door open for a comeback. While Conan hasn’t been seen on the big screen for decades, the iconic barbarian did leap into video games as a guest character in Mortal Kombat 1. Previous Mortal Kombat games also have a Schwarzenegger link, with guest characters like the Terminator and the Predator.
Meanwhile, NetherRealm’s fighting game franchise is also returning to the silver screen soon, as Mortal Kombat 2 hits theaters on May 8.
