Oh No! Arnold Schwarzenegger's LEGEND OF CONAN Film is Dead!
One of the film projects that I've been looking forward most forward to seeing get made is Arnold Schwarzenegger's The Legend of Conan. Everything That I've heard about the film since it was first announced has been awesome, and I believe that it would have been a cinematic masterpiece.
Today my dreams of seeing this movie have been destroyed. During a recent interview at EW with producer and screenwriter Chris Morgan, he was asked if there were any updates on the project and that's where he revealed that it's dead. He says:
"Not so much. That’s kind of a longer story. At the end of the day, the studio decided that they weren’t gonna make that. I gotta say, it’s honestly a heartbreak. I love that first movie so much, so much, it’s one of my favorite movies. We had Will Beall do a draft on [the Legend of Conan script]. He killed it. Our take was Conan, 30 years later, a story like the Clint Eastwood Unforgiven. It was so awesome. Ultimately, the budget was big, the studio was not really sure of the title, and the relevance in the marketplace. They ended up letting it go. I think they’re gonna look to do a TV show or something with it. But just to be associated with it, pitch it to Arnold, have him get so excited, there was a moment of magic for me, personally [laughs]. You never know, down the road we may revisit!"
I'm seriously completely bummed out by this news. It's hearing news like this that makes me want to slap some sense into those silly studio executives that won't let great film ideas thrive in Hollywood.
You know what Morgan should do!? He should take the script to Netflix and pitch it and see if they'd do it. They seem very open to helping develop projects like this that are thrown out by the Hollywood studio system.
One of the last things we heard about the film was the reveal of the opening scene:
“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.”
The movie will pick up right where the classic 1982 film left off with an older King Conan sitting on his throne, deep in thought, wearing the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon his brow. The movie would ignore Richard Fleischer's 1984 Conan The Destroyer and the silly 2011 reboot with Jason Momoa. Morgan previously talked about Conan author Robert E. Howard and the inspiration behind their new 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 incredibly 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 that will never happen, you can read some information here and here. Now I'm just going to go wallow in my grief over the fact that the movie's not happening anymore.