Did you know there’s a fansite for Arnold Schwarzenegger called The Arnold Fans? Nope, nor us, but we’re so glad it exists, because its crew attended the recent Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio (you know the one!) and learned a bunch of details about some upcoming roles for Hollywood’s biggest star. Not only is there the suggestion that Arnie might appear in Dan Trachtenberg’s next Predator movie, and word of a Commando 2, but also some seemingly much more confirmed news of the upcoming King Conan, with the director of the last four Mission Impossible movies, Christopher McQuarrie, at the helm.
Speaking to the fansite, Arnie made it clear that the touted King Conan movie is moving ahead, and that “they just hired a fantastic writer/director who did Tom Cruise’s last four movies. They just hired him to write and direct King Conan.”
You may well ask how a 78-year-old man could play Conan today, but it seems that’s all part of the plot. The Hollywood Reporter says that Schwarzenegger told crowds at the event that, “It’s a great story where Conan was 40 years king…and he gets complacent, and he gets forced out of the kingdom, slowly. 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.” Oh god I hope that was the official pitch to Fox.
The original Conan the Barbarian, based on the novel by Robert E. Howard, came out in 1982 when Arnold Schwarzenegger was just 35 years old. It’s generally considered Arnie’s breakthrough movie, and saw a sequel two years later with Conan the Destroyer. (Although no one can take his performance as Hercules in 1970’s Hercules in New York away from me, and if you’ve never seen 1979’s The Villain, I implore you to find a copy immediately.) That first movie was—extraordinarily—co-written by Oliver Stone, alongside director (and self-professed right-wing extremist) John Milius, with Richard Fleischer making the sequel, while the planned Conan the Conqueror was eventually reworked into Kull the Conqueror.
King Conan is the title of an anthology of stories by Howard, but whether the film will be based on any of those or not isn’t yet known, nor is anything about the plot beyond Arnie’s unimprovable description. We also don’t know when production might start but with McQuarrie in charge, there’s a good chance that should it actually happen, it could be an awful lot of fun.
Schwarzenegger showing up in the next Predator sounds like a dream come true to me. He’s not been involved since the very first movie, and Trachtenberg is on a blisteringly good path with the franchise. That also seems like a thing that could certainly happen. Commando 2, however—I’m a lot more skeptical.
