The last attempt to reboot the Conan franchise was forgettable at best, but Arnold Schwarzenegger, the original film Conan has been working behind the scenes to try and bring back his storyline with a film called ‘Legend Of Conan’, which would revisit the barbarian’s life as a 70-year-old king that has grown weary of sitting on the throne and staying out of the action. In a new interview with TheArnoldFans, Schwarzenegger is painting a picture that is a little less than optimistic about the film getting made:
“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.
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.”
The good news is that Arnold is speaking up. That could help bring some heat to the guy he keeps alluding too as being the one trying to drag Conan in the wrong direction. If he starts to feel enough fan-support for Legend of Conan, there’s a good chance that he’ll see it as a worthwhile investment. Then again, he might just resent being told what to do and turn the whole thing into a garbage fire out of spite.