Action legend Arnold Schwarzenegger is still going strong and wants to revisit some of his most iconic characters.
You know, the endless attempts to revive the Terminator franchise aside, 80s action icon Arnold Schwarzenegger hasn’t done a whole lot of sequels. There’s 1984’s Conan The Destroyer, the Expendables flicks, and… that’s about it, really.
But it seems that’s about to change. Arnie fan site The Arnold Fans got a few quotes from the Austrian Oak at the Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio over the weekend, and it seems that at the age of 78, Schwarzenegger is gearing up to return to some of his most iconic roles.
First cab off the rank is Predator, which makes a heaping helping of sense since writer and director Dan Trachtenberg revitalised the franchise with Prey, Predator: Killer Of Killers, and Predator: Badlands. You may recall we saw an animated version of Schwarzenegger’s Dutch Schaeffer in cold storage in Killer Of Killers, but it looks like Dutch is coming back in the flesh, as it were.
“They did an additional Predator and the director has been doing a great job of that,” Arnie said. “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‘.”
Cool as hell. That throwaway reference to Commando is interesting, too. The 1985 film, which sees the big lad’s John Matrix going on an absolute rampage after old enemies kidnap his daughter, is the movie people are really thinking of when they think “generic mid-80s Arnie action flick”. It’s not like they’re thinking of Raw Deal, after all. It was my favourite movie of all time when I was 10, and remains a pleasurable rewatch today. I can’t say it’s screaming out for a sequel, though, although at one point Die Hard was being set up as the next adventure of John Matrix. All respect to Arnie, but we might have dodged a bullet there.
Still, Commando does have the best “getting ready to kick absolute ass” scene in the history of cinema:
Oh, those poor sons of bitches…
But Conan The Barbarian? Holy hell, does the world need Arnold Schwarzenegger back as Robert E. Howard’s sullen, Cimmerian murder machine. We’ve come close a few times; Conan The King: Crown Of Iron almost happened back in the day under original Conan director John Milius, but never got over the line. Later, Netflix had the Conan rights, and at the time had Arnie on FUBAR and Sin City and Desperado director Robert Rodriguez champing at the bit, but they fumbled the bag. But according to Arnie, a return to the Hyborian Age is very much on the cards.
“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.”
Now, Arnie may be off on his numbers, but Cruise’s most frequent collaborator in recent years has been director Christopher McQuarrie, who directed the last four Mission: Impossible films. That’s pretty exciting, and indicates they’re looking at doing an epic scale Conan movie, given McQuarrie’s box office bona fides.
Schwarzenegger dropped a few plot details too, saying, “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.”
Truly, this is a man who knows what is best in life.
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