Arnold Schwarzenegger is returning to one of his most famous roles — but not for the reason fans might be expecting. Over the weekend, Schwarzenegger took to social media to share a photo of himself sporting a Conan the Barbarian helmet and sword once again, in order to promote his new limited-edition collection of clothing from Represent. The collection even includes a Conan-themed "Bar-barian", shirt, which shows Schwarzenegger's version of the character lifting weights with a pair of skulls attached to the bar instead of weights.
This tweet comes amid a years-long effort to see Schwarzenegger's version of Conan return in some official capacity, including in a hypothetical sequel film called The Legend of Conan. As Schwarzenegger explained in a 2019 interview, there are a number of things that have stalled the return from becoming a reality.
“When it comes to the movie, the sad stuff about all of this is when there’s an estate like this…The Robert E. Howard estate…when someone buys these rights, those people now own the rights and they have their own vision of what they want to do and the guy that has the rights is some young guy and he’s trying to figure out how to get his way through Hollywood and this is not easy to do,” the actor shared with The Arnold Fans. “So there are people that say to him, ‘Why don’t you start with a TV series?’ and then he negotiates for a TV series and that falls apart. And then he goes maybe to Netflix and that falls apart. Then he decides to make a movie maybe.”
"In the meantime, we have been trying to convince him for years now that the way to go is to come back and hire a really great director and to do another Conan movie and have me play King Conan, when Conan is like 70 years old and he’s disgusted by sitting on the throne and being the king and then something happens after that," the actor teased. "It’s really not that far from creating a finished script. The only one who really has to pull the trigger there is the people who own the Conan rights to do a movie. Let’s go to Netflix or whoever it is, let’s hire a director who’s very creative and can elevate the project to make it a winning project.”
Fans almost got their wish in the recent second season of Love Death + Robots, with creator Tim Miller revealing that he and Schwarzenegger had planned for a Conan short in the new batch of episodes.
"It would have been a Conan short. I did want to do a Conan short, but we couldn't get permission," Miller explained during a recent Reddit AMA. "[It would have been based on] Red Nails. It involved Valeria, the pirate queen... a lost city, it was f--ked up. There were dinosaurs in it, too. We just couldn't get permission."
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