Arnold Schwarzenegger has spent the last few years embarrassing himself. His last few movies have been among the lowest-grossing projects he’s been involved in and it’s fairly clear his ability to put asses in seats has passed. Being enormously rich and 67 years old, you’d think this would translate out to quietly stepping aside. But nope, instead, he’s making a Conan movie!
The basic plot makes sense, at least. As we all know, Conan eventually becomes King of Aquilonia, because in Robert E. Howard’s world, political leadership is best determined by how well you stab things. Needless to say, there’s intrigue surrounding the crown and Conan has to do what he does best, namely behead people.
TheArnoldFans, basically the actor’s fansite, caught up with Fredrik Malmberg, the producer of King Conan, and it sounds like Universal actually wants to make the movie:
That’s the intention,” says Malmberg. “Arnold wants that. I would like that and I know everyone from the studio side would like that but it’s all in the script. We need to get the script where it’s right and ready to go. In the movie world, nowadays, when a movie is a go movie, it happens very quickly.”
Whether this will actually happen is an open question, of course: There are always movies in development in Hollywood, and they’re always on the verge of being made according to the people who desperately want you to give them money to produce them. But Arnold is finishing up Terminator Begins, excuse me, Terminator: Genesis and he apparently still wants to hear he’s a movie star. It does help that as poorly as his recent movies have done in the US, they still do OK numbers overseas.
So, yeah, we’re probably going to see one more Conan movie before Schwarzenegger goes back to politics or something. That said, really, somebody should just put Schwarzenegger in touch with Terry Pratchett. We can think of no better leader of the Silver Horde.