Conan the Barbarian - Remake without Schwarzenegger

While not nearly as cool as Conan O’Brien, Conan the Barbarian has been a popular character for some time. He was originally created in 1932 by writer Robert E. Howard in a series of fantasy pulp stories. After that, the character took off. In 1954, a collection of short stories called Conan the Barbarian was published by Gnome Press. In 1970, Marvel Comics started publishing a monthly series starring the warrior. And in 1982, a film version of Conan the Barbarian was released and a young Austrian bodybuilder named Arnold Schwarzenegger became a movie star.

The film was directed my John Milius (director of Red Dawn) and Milius co-wrote it with Oliver Stone, the man who wrote Scarface. James Earl Jones played the film’s antagonist, Thulsa Doom. Max von Sydow (Minority Report) also starred the film as King Osric.

In 1984, a sequel was released entitled Conan the Destroyer, directed by Richard Fleischer, the man behind 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was much lighter in tone than the first film, becoming more of a family-friendly adventure. This brought about a lot of criticism, as fans seemed to greatly prefer the bloodier and more adult themes of the original John Milius film Conan the Barbarian.

The sequel was written by Stanley Mann, but screenwriters Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway had done an earlier draft, which they later released as a graphic novel when they discovered how little they liked the final cut of the film.

A remake of Conan the Barbarian is in the works, with Boaz Yakin writing and possibly directing the project. The film will not star Arnold Schwarzenegger – the current governor of California. With screenplays like The Punisher (the 1989 version, From Dusk Till Dawn 2, and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights under his belt, Yakin doesn’t have a very good track record, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.