Arnold Schwarzenegger revealed during a conversation at this year’s Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio that he is in talks to return to three of his most iconic action franchises: “Predator,” “Conan the Barbarian” and “Commando.”
“They did an additional ‘Predator’ and the director [Dan Trachtenberg] has been doing a great job of that. Now, he wants me to be in the next ‘Predator.’ We’ve talked about it,” Schwarzenegger said to much applause from the convention crowd. “As a matter of fact, Fox Studios has kind of rediscovered Arnold. They’ve come to me and said, ‘We want you to do “Predator,” we just got a script for you to do “Commando 2.”
On the “Conan” front, Schwarzenegger said the studio “just hired a fantastic writer/director who did Tom Cruise’s last four movies to write and direct ‘King Conan.’” It would appear the actor is referring to Christopher McQuarrie, who has collaborated with Cruise on the recent string of “Mission: Impossible” movies.
Variety has reached out to reps for Schwarzenegger and McQuarrie for comment.
“Now, what they do is that they write the part,” the actor said. “They don’t write them like I’m 40 years old. You write it to be age appropriate. I’ll still go in there and kick some ass but it will be different. With ‘King Conan,’ it’s a great old story that Conan was 40 years as king and now he gets forced out of the kingdom and there’s conflict, of course, but somehow he comes back and there’s all kinds of madness, violence, magic and creatures and stuff like that. And now, of course, there’s all kinds of special effects. The studio has plenty of money to make those movies really big so I’m looking forward to all of those projects.”
Schwarzenegger played Conan in 1982’s “Conan the Barbarian” and 1984’s “Conan the Destroyer,” giving him his first major action movie franchise. Hollywood attempted to reboot “Conan” in 2011 with Jason Momoa in the title role, but the film was a box office disappointment with $63 million worldwide on a reported $90 million production budget.
In his 2023 self-help book and memoir “Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life,” Schwarzenegger wrote that “Conan the Barbarian” director John Milius forced him to do “terrible shit” during the making of the film.
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“I learned to ride horses and camels and elephants. I learned how to jump from large rocks, how to climb and swing from long ropes, how to fall from a height,” Schwarzenegger writes (via Insider). “I basically went to another vocational school, this one for aspiring action heroes. Then on top of that, Milius had me doing all kinds of terrible shit. I crawled through rocks, take after take, until my forearms bled. I ran from wild dogs that managed to catch me and pull me into a thorn bush. I bit a real dead vulture that required I wash my mouth out with alcohol after each take. (PETA would have a field day with that one). On one of the first days of filming, I tore a gash on my back that required 40 stitches.”
As for “Predator,” Schwarzenegger already made a pseudo-return to the franchise last year when his likeness was used for a cameo appearance in Trachtenberg’s animated anthology movie “Predator: Killer of Killers.” Schwarzenegger’s character, Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer, appears in a suspended animation chamber, opening the door for his return in future installments.
From Variety US