Arnold Schwarzenegger Reviving Another Of His Classic Characters On Netflix
Will Arnold Schwarzenegger be back? He's working to revive one of his iconic characters for Netflix.
This article is more than 2 years old
In this year itself, there have been multiple reports of many iconic Arnold Schwarzenegger films either getting rebooted, remade, or finally getting that highly anticipated sequel. We have rumors about Dwayne Johnson seeking to remake the Predator franchise while Schwarzenegger’s The Running Man is being remade with Edgar Wright helming it. And now, Deadpool director Tim Miller has revealed that the actor has been vying to revive another one of his classic characters: Conan the Barbarian.
The second season of the animated anthology series Love, Death & Robots was recently released on Netflix and contains a fresh batch of short episodes based on contrasting genres and different stories. But turns out, it had more to offer as we almost got a Conan The Barbarian episode on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s request. In fact, he was even going to voice the character. In a recent Reddit Live, series creator Tim Miller revealed Schwarzenegger had repeatedly contacted him about playing the role of Conan the Barbarian in the Netflix show.
As to what the short episode would have entailed, Miller shared that it would have focused on Conan, with Arnold Schwarzenegger returning to reprise the character. The short would have been based on Red Nails, the final story about Conan’s adventures written by author Robert E. Howard in 1936. The episode would have included “Valeria, the pirate queen… a lost city” and even had dinosaurs in it.
The tale Miller talked about during the Reddit Live is set in the pseudo-historical Hyborian Age and sees Conan in a lost city whose population has given up and is just waiting for their deaths. The story would have been perfect for the Emmy-winning NSFW series, especially with Arnold Schwarzenegger returning to voice the character of Conan. But due to copyright issues, Miller couldn’t get permission to make the Conan-centric episode for Love, Death & Robots.
Arnold Schwarzenegger brought to life the classic character for the first time in Conan the Barbarian in 1982, earning the actor worldwide recognition and gaining the film a cult status for its immense popularity. The success of the film spawned a sequel, Conan the Destroyer, in 1984. A third film, titled Conan the Conqueror, was planned for a 1987 release. But at the time Arnold Schwarzenegger was busy with Predator and soon the third Conan film fell into development hell. In 2011, a reboot starring Jason Momoa as Conan was released but it was a box office bomb.
In 2012, it was once again announced that Arnold Schwarzenegger was set to return to the role of Conan for the film The Legend of Conan, a direct sequel to the original film, and the actor himself expressed the enthusiasm to revive the character that launched his career from being a bodybuilder to that of a big movie star. But by 2017, Universal had scrapped all plans for the project.
But sounds like Arnold Schwarzenegger is still very much interested in reviving his iconic character for Love, Death & Robots. Who knows, maybe by the time the production for the third season begins, Miller will get the necessary permissions to introduced an animated Conan the Barbarian!
