Every year, Arnold Schwarzenegger stops by Columbus, Ohio for the Arnold Sports Festival. This year's edition of the festival just wrapped up yesterday, and while Schwarzenegger was there the folks from TheArnoldFans.com were able to catch up with him and ask him some questions about DEADPOOL director Tim Miller's upcoming TERMINATOR sequel (possibly titled TERMINATOR: DARK FATE) and check on the status of his return to the role of Conan.
Speaking about the experience of working on the latest TERMINATOR film, which marks the return of James Cameron to the franchise as a guiding creative force, Schwarzenegger praised Miller as "very, very talented" and said,
It was a very interesting film to do with Tim, the dynamic, between him and with Jim Cameron producing. So Jim Cameron is right now directing Avatar films so he’s taken on this enormous challenge and he’s very busy with that BUT he’s a control freak and as you know, Terminator is kind of his baby so he does get involved in the filming so there were interesting discussions about which direction to go with a certain scene or how the dialogue should finish or what the certain look should be of an individual and all that stuff so there was a big collaboration between Jim and Tim Miller. I feel it was in good hands with both of them."
Schwarzenegger estimates that the budget for the sequel is somewhere in the range of 160 to 200 million dollars. Filming has been completed and the project is currently in post-production.
This new TERMINATOR is connected only to the first two movies in the franchise. Schwarzenegger's co-stars include Linda Hamilton, Mackenzie Davis, Gabriel Luna, Natalia Reyes, and Diego Boneta. The film is scheduled to reach theatres on November 1st.
Linda Hamilton and James Cameron returning for more TERMINATOR is a big deal… but not as big of a deal as it would be if Schwarzenegger ever gets his chance to play Conan again. He has been wanting to star in a movie that would portray Conan as a restless King for a long time, and putting such a project into production would seem to be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, the rights situation is causing a delay.
The sad stuff about all of this is when there’s an estate like this, The Robert E. Howard estate… when someone buys these rights, those people now own the rights and they have their own vision of what they want to do and the guy that has the rights is some young guy and he’s trying to figure out how to get his way through Hollywood and this is not easy to do. So there are people that say to him, 'why don’t you start with a TV series and then he negotiates for a TV series and that falls apart. And then he goes maybe to Netflix and that falls apart. Then he decides to make a movie maybe… but in the meantime, we have been trying to convince him for years now that the way to go is to come back and hire a really great director and to do another Conan movie and have me play King Conan, when Conan is like 70 years old and he's disgusted by sitting on the throne and being the king and then something happens after that. It’s really not that far from creating a finished script. The only one who really has to pull the trigger there is the people who own the Conan rights to do a movie. Let’s go to Netflix or whoever it is, let’s hire a director who’s very creative and can elevate the project to make it a winning project. I hope it will be done very soon because I think it’s a great idea."
A year ago, we heard that a Conan the Barbarian series was in the works at Amazon, but that project, as Schwarzenegger indicated (even though he said Netflix instead of Amazon), has since fallen apart. This does seem to be the perfect time to get that "King Conan" project rolling, so hopefully the rights holder will decide to pursue it. Let's get it done while Schwarzenegger can still do it.