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Arnold Schwarzenegger has told Jimmy Kimmel that a new Conan, a return to Predator and a Commando sequel are all on the way. There is one small condition. Somebody has to write them first.
The 79-year-old was on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Wednesday 11 November, mainly to promote his Prime Video Christmas comedy The Man with the Bag (out 2 December) and to discuss politics. Kimmel brought up the sequels, and Schwarzenegger did not deny any of them. “I’m looking forward to see the scripts, because that’s where the action is,” he said, before offering a line that belongs on a fridge magnet: “You know what’s not on the page is not on the stage.” Then: “So I just wait for the scripts to be perfected and then we go and start shooting those things.”
The Conan in question is King Conan, and Schwarzenegger gave the pitch himself: “King Conan is a Conan who is my age and has been king for 40 years.” This Conan has become “somewhat complacent”, and his subjects would like to overthrow him. Forty years in charge and the people want a change: there is a joke about British politics in there somewhere, but Crom forbid we should make it.
Purists may be surprised to find that the old-king version is the real deal. When Robert E. Howard introduced Conan in “The Phoenix on the Sword” in Weird Tales in December 1932, the barbarian was already middle-aged, ruling Aquilonia from a throne he had taken by force, and fending off conspirators who wanted him dead. The young loincloth years came afterwards, in flashback. So an older, crowned Conan is not Hollywood stretching a franchise. It is Howard’s own starting point, delivered 94 years late.
The project has been around before. Universal announced The Legend of Conan in 2012 and had quietly dropped it by 2017. This time it is at 20th Century Studios, and Christopher McQuarrie, director of the last four Mission: Impossible films, is reported to be writing and directing. Schwarzenegger said earlier that “the studio has plenty of money to make those movies really big”. The studio has said nothing about a start date.
The Predator return is vaguer. Schwarzenegger has met Dan Trachtenberg, the director who has turned the franchise around with Prey, the animated Predator: Killer of Killers and Predator: Badlands (Kermode reviewed it here). Badlands became the series’ biggest earner at $184.5m worldwide. Fans will remember that Killer of Killers ended with a cryogenically frozen Dutch, which makes defrosting him for a sequel the most straightforward resurrection in the franchise. No new Predator film with Schwarzenegger has been confirmed. As for Commando 2, reports say a script exists. Schwarzenegger mentioned it but gave no details, which may be the most restraint anyone has ever shown about Commando.
To be clear about what this is, and what it is not: a much-loved star said nice things on a chat show about three films, and no studio has confirmed any of them. Headlines claiming he “officially confirms” the trio are, like his character in Commando, carrying more than seems physically possible. Of the three, King Conan has the most behind it: a studio, a director and a premise taken straight from Howard.
Schwarzenegger first wielded the sword in 1982’s Conan the Barbarian and 1984’s Conan the Destroyer, and has been threatening an old-king sequel for more than a decade (we covered one of his earlier “I’ll be back” moments years ago). If McQuarrie can get a script past him, we may yet see the barbarian king complaining that nobody bows properly any more, then cleaving someone in half to make his point. Crom would approve.
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