Arnold Schwarzenegger is in talks to return to his most famous action film franchises.
The 78-year-old action star revealed movie bosses want him to start in follow-ups to Predator, Conan the Barbarian and Commando during a conversation at the Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio, where he discussed potential new projects connected to the film series that helped define his action career.
Arnold first played Conan in the 1982 film Conan the Barbarian and its 1984 sequel Conan the Destroyer. He later starred in the 1987 sci-fi action film Predator and the 1985 military action film Commando. Speaking to an audience at the convention, Arnold said studios have approached him about returning to those roles decades after the original films were released.
Arnold said: “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.”
He added: “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.”
Arnold also spoke about a possible continuation of the Conan storyline, saying the studio has recently brought in a filmmaker to develop a new film titled King Conan. Arnold said: “Now, what they do is that they write the part.”
He added: “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 a** but it will be different.”
He continued about the proposed Conan sequel: “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.”
Arnold said: “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.”
Arnold appeared to refer to the filmmaker Christopher McQuarrie, who has directed several recent films starring Tom Cruise, in the Mission: Impossible franchise, as being linked to the project. He said movie executives had “just hired a fantastic writer/director who did Tom Cruise’s last four movies to write and direct King Conan”.
A previous attempt to relaunch the Conan franchise came in 2011 when Jason Momoa played the title role in a reboot of Conan the Barbarian. The film earned $63 million (S$80.2 million) worldwide on a reported $90 million production budget.
In his 2023 memoir Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life, Arnold described the physical demands placed on him during the production of the original Conan the Barbarian, which was directed by John Milius.
Arnold wrote: “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.” He continued: “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 s***.
“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.”
Arnold also wrote: “On one of the first days of filming, I tore a gash on my back that required 40 stitches.”
The former bodybuilder also made a brief return to the Predator universe in 2025 when his likeness appeared in the animated anthology film Predator: Killer of Killers, directed by Dan Trachtenberg. In the film, Arnold’s character Major Alan ‘Dutch’ Schaefer appears in a suspended animation chamber, a scene that left open the possibility of the character returning in future instalments of the franchise.
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