Action legend Arnold Schwarzenegger has indicated that he could be returning to several of his most famous franchises in the near future.
Once a year, the Arnold Sports Festival is held in Columbus, Ohio – an annual and lucrative sports competition and often considered the second-most-prestigious event in professional men’s bodybuilding after Mr. Olympia.
The now 78-year-old Schwarzenegger was reportedly in attendance and the longest running Arnie news site, TheArnoldFans, has landed quotes from the man himself in which he offered updates on the potential returns Dutch from “Predator,” Conan the Barbarian and even his “Commando” character of John Matrix.
Dan Trachtenberg’s animated film “Predator: Killer of Killers” included an epilogue scene in which the Dutch character was seen being put into cold storage by the Yautja (the “Predator” aliens). Trachtenberg revealed back in July last year he had met with Schwarzenegger to discuss what they could do with Dutch next and had been given the go-ahead by Arnold “to cook more stories with him”. Schwarzenegger essentially confirmed that this weekend, saying:
“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. 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’.”
Schwarzenegger also says movement is also happening on the next “Conan the Barbarian” film, presumably “King Conan” which deals with an elderly version of the character. More interesting is that he seems to suggest that none other than filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie may be writing and directing:
“They just hired a fantastic writer/director who did Tom Cruise’s last four movies. They just hired him to write and direct King Conan. Now, what they do is that they write the part. They don’t write them like i’m forty 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, its a great old story that Conan was forty 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.”
A previous attempt was made back in the early 2000s to produce “King Conan: Crown of Iron,” which would’ve seen John Milius returning to direct while “The Matrix” filmmakers the Wachowskis were briefly attached to produce. That project fell apart in development. The property was ultimately rebooted in 2011 with Jason Momoa.
