Before
Arnold Schwarzenegger became the iconic T-800 and an action movie icon, the legendary actor made his first big break in Hollywood by portraying the titular character in 1982's Conan the Barbarian, which was followed by Conan the Destroyer in 1984. A third installment, titled Legend of Conan and featuring Old Man Conan, has unfortunately sat in development hell, even though a poster was released several years back.
Speaking with
TheArnoldFans at the
Arnold Sports Festival,
Schwarzenegger provided an update on the stalled Conan project, explaining that the movie has yet to get underway due to issues surrounding the rights to the franchise.
When it comes to the movie, the sad stuff about all of this is when there’s an estate like this, 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 and 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. And then he goes maybe to Netflix and that falls apart.
However, despite all of these challenges, Arnold has yet to give up hope on
Legend of Conan coming to fruition, continuously trying to convince those in charge of the rights to make a third installment in the franchise. Arnold stresses the need to find the right director to make the project a success, and even highlights Netflix as a potential avenue for the movie.
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 and to do another Conan movie and have me play King Conan, when Conan is like 70 years old and 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.
Hopefully his persistence and dedication to the project pays off.
Would you be excited to see Arnold play Conan one more time? Be sure to check out the video below from last month, in which Arnie shows off a limited edition copy of Marvel's new Conan the Barbarian comic and once again expresses his desire to make
Legend of Conan.