Over the past few years, many people – well, the Wachowski brothers and John Milius – have tried, and failed, to bring Robert E. Howard’s muscled warrior, Conan, back to the big screen.
Today, though, it seems that we got a couple of steps closer to it actually happening when Nu Image/Millennium Films, which owns the rights to the new movie, made a North American distribution deal with Lionsgate. If distribution deals are happening, then there’s a good chance that the movie will be, too. Especially now that it has writers on board.
Yes, the team of Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer have been charged with breathing life back into Conan, who was last seen on the big screen in those two Arnold Schwarzenegger classics (well, one classic, and one that’s ropey-as-hell), Conan The Barbarian (the good one) and Conan The Destroyer (the rubbish one) in the early 1980s.
Ordinarily, Donnelly and Oppenheimer – who wrote Sahara and Cowboys vs Aliens, just in case you were worried about their credentials – wouldn’t be able to type a single word until the writers’ strike is resolved, which at the present rate should be sometime in 2014.
However, Nu Image/Millennium chief Avi Lerner is in talks with the WGA to broker a special deal, along the lines of the Weinstein Company and United Artists deals, that would allow his crack writing team to start work while the strike is ongoing.
If that goes ahead, Lerner is hoping to start shooting later this year.
No word yet on the plot – whether, for example, the movie will be a sequel to the earlier Conan movies, or if it’ll be a reboot for the character. Certainly, when Milius and the Wachowskis were working on their Conan movie, it was called King Conan and called for Governor Schwarzenegger to show up for a while. He’s pretty busy these days, so we’d put money on the reboot.
If Conan does return, it will mark the second Robert E. Howard character to go before the cameras this year, with Brit director Michael J. Bassett about to start shooting on Solomon Kane. At this rate, Sailor Steve Costigan: The Movie can only be a heartbeat away! (And yes, we did look that up on the internet)