Arnold Schwarzenegger Explains the Frustrations of Why a New CONAN Film Hasn't Happened
There’s been an awesome concept for a new Conan movie floating around for awhile. That concept is for a film called Legend of Conan, and it came from screenwriter Chris Morgan.
The film would be a sequel to the classic 1982 film which left off with an older King Conan sitting on his throne, deep in thought, wearing the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon his brow. This film is nowhere near getting made at this point and that’s because of rights issues.
Arnold still wants to reprise his role, and in a recent interview with The Arnold Fans he explains the why the film is being held up and is certainly sounds frustrating:
“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. Then he decides to make a movie maybe.”
That’s a bummer. Schwarzenegger doesn’t reveal who the rights owner is, but apparently he has his own ideas for the movie because Schwarzenegger hasn’t even been able to convince him to go with their idea. I wouldn’t be surprised if the current rights holder probably hasn’t even seen the original Conan movie.
“We have been trying to convince [the rights holder] 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.”
The script for the film was being written by Chris Morgan, and this is a little tease of how the movie would open:
“It opens with this [hand on the chin]. It’s where you have to. It’s the sequel that we were promised and never got. I’m 11 when my father took me to see Conan the Barbarian which you should never take an 11-year-old kid to. It was a life changing thing. It’s an unbelievable movie. It comes back to [director John] Milius, right? There’s nobody better and it’s a real movie. It’s a truthful movie. Chris and I from the very beginning said there’s no reason to do it unless it’s a worthy sequel to Milius’s Conan and I think we’ve got that. I really do.”
This movie would have ignored Richard Fleischer's 1984 Conan The Destroyer and the 2011 reboot with Jason Momoa. Morgan previously talked about Conan author Robert E. Howard and the inspiration behind the movie, saying:
"We look at all the source material and we love things that kind of speak to that tone. We’re incredibly respectful to Howard. I’m a huge fan of the stories and books, but I’m a super-huge fan of the first movie, because that crystallised and distilled it all for me. [John] Milius just killed it. He did such a good job. And Legend Of Conan is really resonant and it really digs into the legacy of that original film. I'm already very proud of it."
Morgan also previously described his version of Conan, which is initially what got me super excited for this project:
"I want the warrior whose joints have started to fuse together, who has to crack the cartilage so he can pick up a sword again. I want the guy who’s not necessarily lost a step, but there’s some rust he has to shake off. I want to embrace that. It makes it a greater hero story.
"Conan needs to be faced with challenges. The greatest challenge to him isn’t the armies that are set before him. It’s, on some level, self-doubt, a little bit of slowing down and forcing yourself to be heroic beyond what people expect of you. What I don’t want is for him to step back in and look the same. That would defeat the purpose of our story. "
For more details on the film you can click here and here. It’d be a bloody shame if this movie never happened. It seems like a no brainier to move forward with such an awesome concept like this. But the rights holder obviously doesn’t want what the rest of the Conan fans want. That’s a shame.