Arnold Schwarzenegger is coming back as Conan. He announced it himself at the Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio two weeks ago, and 20th Century Studios has since confirmed it.
The film is called King Conan. Christopher McQuarrie, the writer-director behind the last four Mission: Impossible films is attached to write and direct.
t is Schwarzenegger’s first time playing the character since Conan the Destroyer in 1984. He is 78 years old. He says he will still kick some ass.
“They just hired a fantastic writer/director who did Tom Cruise’s last four movies to write and direct King Conan,” Schwarzenegger told the crowd at the festival.
He then described the plot himself,
“It’s a great story where Conan was king for 40 years, and he gets complacent, and now he gets forced out of the kingdom. Then there’s conflict, of course, and then he somehow comes back, and then there’s all kinds of madness and violence and magic and creatures. Now, of course, you have all the special effects, and the studio system has plenty of money to make those movies really big.”
No cast beyond Schwarzenegger has been announced. No release date, no production start date, no budget. What exists is a director, a star, a studio, and a premise.
Why Did It Take 42 Years?
The gap between Conan the Destroyer and King Conan is not for lack of trying.
The franchise has been stuck in development hell in various forms since the mid-1980s, and the history of failed attempts is almost as interesting as the films themselves.
The first attempt at a third Conan came in 1987 under the working title Conan the Conqueror, which was abandoned as Schwarzenegger’s career shifted toward Predator, Total Recall, and the Terminator sequels.
The character sat dormant for decades until 2012, when producers Chris Morgan and Frederick Malmberg announced The Legend of Conan, an Unforgiven-style story that would pick up with an older Conan and restore the original timeline that the 2011 Jason Momoa reboot had bypassed.
That project had Universal Pictures attached and ran for five years of active development before the studio pulled out in 2017 over financial concerns. It was never made.
20th Century Studios spent a significant portion of the last year acquiring the rights to the character.
The announcement of McQuarrie’s involvement confirms that the rights situation has been resolved and the project has genuine institutional momentum behind it.
Who Is Christopher McQuarrie?
Christopher McQuarrie is not a franchise journeyman. He is the writer-director who turned the Mission: Impossible series, a franchise that peaked with Rogue Nation in 2015, into arguably the most consistently excellent blockbuster franchise of the last decade.
He directed and co-wrote Rogue Nation, Fallout, Dead Reckoning, and The Final Reckoning, the last of which grossed nearly $600 million worldwide. He also co-wrote Top Gun: Maverick.
His instinct with action is precision over spectacle, he builds sequences around geography and consequence rather than volume.
King Conan will be his first directing project outside the Mission: Impossible franchise since Jack Reacher in 2012.
The IMDB page for the film lists Will Beall and Andrea Berloff alongside McQuarrie in the writing credits, suggesting a collaborative screenplay process, though the credits may update as development progresses.
What McQuarrie brings to the Conan material specifically is a talent for aging protagonists under pressure.
Ethan Hunt across his four Mission: Impossible films is explicitly a man who should have stopped doing this by now, who keeps going anyway, who pays a visible physical cost for every mission.
That is the exact territory King Conan is designed to explore.
What Is The Story Of The New Conan Movie?
The premise is built directly around Schwarzenegger’s age rather than in spite of it. Conan has been king for 40 years.
He has grown complacent. He is forced off his throne, by whom and how has not been disclosed, and must fight to reclaim it through conflict, sorcery, and “all kinds of madness, violence, magic and creatures,” in Schwarzenegger’s own words.
The story picks up the thread of the final image of the original 1982 film, which ended with Conan seated on a throne as an elder, a destiny that was promised and then left unresolved for over four decades.
Schwarzenegger has been clear that the part will be written age-appropriately.
He is not being de-aged. He is not being replaced. The film is being built around who he actually is at 78. “I’ll still go in there and kick some ass but it will be different,” he said.
The Original Films And What They Were
Conan the Barbarian was released in 1982, directed by John Milius from a script Milius wrote with Oliver Stone.
It was a genuinely strange film for a major studio, slow, mythological, operatic, shot with Hans Zimmer protégé Basil Poledouris composing a score that sounded like a religious ceremony.
It made $68 million on a $17 million budget and made Schwarzenegger a star.
The production was notoriously brutal. Schwarzenegger later wrote in his memoir Be Useful that director Milius had him doing “all kinds of terrible shit,” crawling through rocks until his forearms bled, running from wild dogs that caught him and pulled him into a thorn bush, biting a real dead vulture that required washing his mouth with alcohol after every take.
He tore a 40-stitch gash in his back on one of the first days of filming.
Conan the Destroyer followed in 1984, directed by Richard Fleischer with a lighter tone that diluted what the original had built.
It performed respectably but damaged the franchise’s credibility. A third film was planned. It was not made.
Robert E. Howard created the character in 1932 for Weird Tales magazine, Conan is a Cimmerian warrior navigating brutal battles, political intrigue, and supernatural threats in the fictional Hyborian Age.
The character has been in continuous publication in various forms since the 1930s.
What Else Schwarzenegger Revealed
At the same Arnold Sports Festival appearance, Schwarzenegger disclosed that 20th Century Studios has approached him about two additional legacy projects.
A return to the Predator franchise, where his likeness was already used for a cameo in the recent animated film Predator: Killer of Killers, and Commando 2, a sequel to his 1985 action film. He described the studio as having “rediscovered Arnold.”
King Conan is the one with the most confirmed creative attachment at this point, a studio, a writer-director, and a star who has been carrying this character for 42 years.
