One of Hollywood’s biggest action stars hasn’t been seen on the big screen since 2019’s poorly received Terminator: Dark Fate... But now, "The Austrian Oak" is staging a comeback.
Arnold Schwarzenegger has revealed that he is currently in talks to return to his first franchise, Conan the Barbarian.
The 1982 action-adventure film was the former body builder's breakout role, before James Cameron’s The Terminator propelled him to international fame two years later.
The 78-year-old former Governor of California is not just limiting his return to one franchise though... He’s in talks to return to the worlds of Commando (1985) and Predator (1987).
“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 revealed at this year’s Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio, according to Variety.
“As a matter of fact, Fox Studios has kind of rediscovered Arnold,” he added. “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 said that for the Conan sequel, the studio “just hired a fantastic writer/director who did Tom Cruise’s last four movies to write and direct King Conan.”
He seems to be referring to Christopher McQuarrie – who directed Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018), Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning (2023) and Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025) – as well as write and produce 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick.
He clarified that all three roles will be “different” and written to better reflect his current age.
“They don’t write them like I’m 40 years old. You write it to be age-appropriate,” he explained. “I’ll still go in there and kick some ass but it will be different.”
Addressing plans for King Conan, Schwarzenegger added: “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.”
Hollywood previously attempted to reboot Conan in 2011 with Jason Momoa in the title role. However, the film was a box office letdown, with $63 million worldwide on a reported $90 million production budget.
