Conan may yet return… but It might take a little convincing.
Arnold Schwarzenegger recently sat down with website The Arnold Fans to talk about a number of projects including King Conan, the proposed sequel to 1982’s Conan the Barbarian and 1984’s Conan the Destroyer. Alternately referred to as Legend of Conan, the project had been teased as long ago as 2012, when rights holders Paradox Entertainment (since rebranded as Cabinet Entertainment) announced that they were moving forward with a story that they called “Conan’s Unforgiven,” referring to the classic 1992 Clint Eastwood film about an old gunslinger who reluctantly picks up his guns one last time.
Production studio Universal ultimately opted to drop the project, and it’s been in a state of flux since then. It was even briefly thought that the property would get the small screen treatment, with Amazon Prime announcing plans to develop a series in February of last year before unceremoniously scrapping those plans just months later. All the while, fans have held out hope for a return to theaters for the Cimmerian, and in recent years it hasn’t been Schwarzenegger who has made the most noise about it but Paul Verhoeven, the legendary Robocop director. He’s been expressing his desire to direct Schwarzenegger in the film for years, and the star himself has been game. But according to Arnie’s recent interview, it hasn’t been a matter of scheduling conflicts or creative differences that have kept the adventures of Conan from being revisited on the big screen, but an old and familiar nemesis — rights issues.
Cabinet still holds those rights, and in Schwarzenegger’s humble opinion, they don’t have the faintest idea how to effectively exploit their property. “The sad stuff about all of this is 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,” the actor says. “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.”
(Excerpt) Read More at: Looper.com