Arnold Schwarzenegger and Universal Reuniting for THE LEGEND OF CONAN
“I always loved the Conan character and I’m honored to be asked to step into the role once again. I can’t wait to work with Universal and the great team of Fredrik Malmberg and Chris Morgan to develop the next step of this truly epic story.” Well, 65 year old Ah-nuld is set to reprise his role as the mythic barbarian in Universal’s THE LEGEND OF CONAN. The film will be linked directly to the original 1982 film and not its sequel or the most recent reboot starring Jason Momoa.
Chris Morgan, the Universal-based writer and producer of the last four Fast and the Furious films and 47 Ronin, has come up with the story and may write the script if he has enough time given his commitment to finishing the seventh installment of the Fast and Furious franchise. They want to move this project along quickly and hopefully have the film ready for release by summer 2014.
“After the original seminal movie, all that came after looked silly to me,” Morgan remarked. “Robert E. Howard’s mythology and some great philosophy from Nietzsche to Atilla the Hun was layered in the original film. People say, he didn’t speak for the first 20 minutes of the film, but that was calculated in depicting this man who takes control of life with his own hand. This movie picks up Conan where Arnold is now in his life, and we will be able to use the fact that he has aged in this story. I love the property of Conan so much that I wouldn’t touch it unless we came up with something worthy. We think this is a worthy successor to the original film. Think of this as Conan’s Unforgiven.”
Morgan on the violence depicted in the first film and whether or not they’ll follow suit:
“I loved the choices they made in that film. You start with the wholesale slaughter and death of Conan’s village at the hand of the warlord played by James Earl Jones, and you see young Conan chained to a wheel as he becomes stronger. Then he’s a pit fighter, and later basically a stud bull before he meets the first kind person of his life, who lets him go. All of that horrific stuff happened for a reason, and then an act of kindness sends him on his journey. Will that level of violence be there? Absolutely, but only if it serves a character who lives by that barbarian law of the wild, who is capable of extreme violence and rage, but who has created his own code and operates from within it. By the end of that film, Conan became a certain character, and this film picks him up there, as he faces different challenges that include dealing with age.”
[via Deadline]