Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fantasy fever dream: inside the battle to make King Conan

One summer afternoon in the early Eighties, Oliver Stone and Arnold Schwarzenegger went, in Stone’s words, “to Santa Monica Beach to hang out”. It was a walk to the seaside but also, in a way, into the future.

Stone and Schwarzenegger would reshape Hollywood in their macho images within a few years. But at the time of their stroll, they were pinning their ambitions on the fantasy movie they were making together: Conan The Barbarian. Scripted by Stone, starring Arnold as the eponymous shirtless warrior, it was a brutal brawn-fest. Conan brimmed with beheadings, sex-crazed witches and James Earl Jones putting in the performance of his career as a philosopher-villain heading an evil snake cult.

Having gone through the grinder writing the Conan screenplay, Stone appreciated a walk in the sunshine. Fuelled by cocaine and anti-depressants, the script was described by the movie’s director, the larger than life, Hemingway-worshipping John Milius, as a “fever dream” – and feverish is the only way to describe Stone’s decision to set the story in a post-apocalyptic America stocked with “mutant monsters”.

“Fever dream” was just what Milius wanted. He toned down Stone’s excesses – ditching the post-apocalyptic setting and mutant hoards. But he retained the gonzo energy that had crackled through Stone’s screenplay.

Schwarzenegger’s hunger for fame was even more insatiable than Stone’s. Alas, casting directors struggled to see the young Austrian as anything other than a lunk with biceps where his brains should be. Even a scene-stealing appearance in the 1977 body-building documentary Pumping Iron had failed to take his career to the next level.

Stone was the first person in Hollywood who looked beyond the one-time Mr Universe’s muscles. Walking to the beach, he picked up on Schwarzenegger’s charisma and laid-back humour. He was struck, too, by how readily the public was drawn to Schwarzenegger.

“We started as two sunbathers, and within an hour, I was surprised to see 20 people that already circled his towel with their own, like smaller planets around the sun,” Stone wrote in his 2020 autobiography Chasing the Light. “Within two hours, there must have been 50 or 60 fellow bathers, all proud to join the orbit around the people’s hero.”

Conan The Barbarian, finally released in May 1982, was a milestone for Stone and Schwarzenegger. On the back of its success, Brian DePalma made Stone’s script for the gangster epic Scarface. In 1986, Stone finally made it to the top, bagging multiple Oscars for his Vietnam meditation Platoon – a film plenty fever-dreamish in its own right.

Conan was an even bigger triumph for Schwarzenegger. He quickly followed it with his scene-stealing turn as a killer robot in James Cameron’s Terminator. An action icon was born.

Four decades on, at age 75, Schwarzenegger is one of Hollywood’s last true movie stars. The charisma that impressed Stone is now on the small screen as the actor turned Governor of California makes his first starring TV role in the Netflix thriller Fubar. But even as the “Governator” transitions to streaming, part of his legacy remains unfilled. One that goes back to Oliver Stone and that walk to Santa Monica Beach.

Stone and Schwarzenegger were attracted to the Conan character for similar reasons. Conan predates The Lord of the Rings, and the Stone/Arnold movie is everything Tolkien was not: brawny, lusty and action-packed. To this, Arnold brought the magic ingredient of his charm. “Charisma… radiated from him with his ready smile and sense of humour,” Stone recalled. “Strangers were drawn to him immediately.”

Stone saw Conan as a potentially lucrative franchise: a swords and sorcery “James Bond”. Every few years, a new movie would be released featuring Schwarzenegger running around swinging an axe and praising Conan’s god Crom (the character draws on the Celtic legend – in the books, Conan goes as Conan the Cimmerian, or as it would be today, “Conan the Welshman”).

That Conan was being set up for a sequels is spelt out as the credits roll. In the final scene, the barbarian, having triumphantly killed his nemesis Thulsa Doom (Earl Jones), inherited the villain’s kingdom – and his throne. All hail King Conan.

Or not. There was a sequel, the disposable and semi-comedic Conan the Destroyer, in 1984. A year after that, Schwarzenegger played a Conan-esque warrior-king, Lord Kalidor, in another Robert E Howard adaptation, Red Sonja (opposite Brigitte Nielsen, with whom he had, in his own words, “a red hot affair”).

And then, the actor put down his broadsword and did not pick it up again. Conan fans have wondered if Schwarzenegger would ever take up the character’s story from where it concluded at the end of that first film, with the warrior king perched uneasily on Thulsa Doom’s throne.

Schwarzenegger has wondered too. Rumours of a new Conan film –potential titles have included King Conan and The Legend of Conan – have swirled for years. As he has aged, Schwarzenegger has, if anything, become more obsessed with coming back as Conan.

He reminded fans of his passion for the character in 2021 when, in the wake of the January 6 riots in Washington DC, he went to YouTube to beg Americans to set aside their political differences. After a spiel about brotherhood and forgiveness, Arnold produced the sword he had wielded as Conan, saying, “Our democracy is like the steel of this sword. The more it is tempered, the stronger it becomes.”

Nobody would compare Arnold, even in his prime, to Laurence Olivier – but, among the 1980s generation of action stars, he was by far the best actor. Perhaps that is why, even as contemporaries such as Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme have plummeted into obscurity, Schwarzenegger remains watchable. He is the best thing in the otherwise entirely schlocky Fubar – an action comedy which only works because of Arnold’s dead-pan lovability.

He is also savvy enough to understand King Conan could be his crowning glory as an actor. He sees the project as his opportunity to do for fantasy what Clint Eastwood did for the Western in the 1990s when he demolished the myths of the Old West with the melancholic and subversive Unforgiven. “I think you do it like Unforgiven,” said Arnold. “You play the age.”

Hollywood has flirted with a Conan comeback too. As recently as 10 years ago, it tried to take advantage of the post Game of Thrones fantasy hype to reboot the character with Khal Drogo himself, Jason Momoa, starring as the titular warrior. Unfortunately, Momoa lacked Schwarzenegger’s magnetism – on the screen, there is only one Conan. The Austrian obelisk.

Yet if Schwarzenegger is keen on returning as Conan, he isn’t optimistic about the project ever seeing daylight. At least two King Conan scripts are in circulation. One is by Conan director Milius, who, around 2002, had been eager to direct. But he claims he was blocked by Matrix siblings, the Wachowskis, who had vague plans to put their personal spin on Howard.

“It was never green-lit. I signed a contract to write it and I wrote it. You know who stopped it? It was really the Wachowskis at Warner Bros,” he said in 2014. “I was going to direct it but they jacked around with it and they wanted to make ‘their’ movie and kept giving me vague stupid notes and stuff. I don’t know if they had any intention on ever making it.”

Milius believed King Conan, as his version was called, could be a definitive sign-off by Schwarzenegger later in his career. However, he also felt time had moved on, and he could no longer bring Conan’s story to a dignified close. “I wouldn’t direct it. I don’t think so. I think I have one big movie left in me. But I don’t know; maybe I’ll be so rejuvenated that I’ll want to direct something else too. But King Conan is a terrific thing and an excellent thing for him to do. But he should get a young director for it.”

Milius’s comments came as a second script was already doing the rounds –from Fast and the Furious writer Chris Morgan and Universal Pictures. “We look at all the source material and we love things that kind of speak to that tone. We’re incredibly respectful to Howard. I’m a huge fan of the stories and books, but I’m a super-huge fan of the first movie, because that crystallised and distilled it all for me,” said Morgan. “Milius just killed it. He did such a good job. And Legend Of Conan is really resonant and it really digs into the legacy of that original film. I’m already very proud of it.”

Alas, cold feet amongst executives led to the new Conan’s cancellation – as a despairing Morgan revealed in 2017. “At the end of the day, the studio decided that they weren’t gonna make that. I gotta say, it’s honestly a heartbreak,” he said. “I love that first movie so much, so much, it’s one of my favourite movies. We had Will Beall [Aquaman, Justice League] do a draft. He killed it.”

Morgan’s project was called The Legend of Conan and would have had that Clint Eastwood-esque grittiness Schwarzenegger believed we needed from the warrior later in life.

“Our take was Conan, 30 years later, a story like the Clint Eastwood Unforgiven. It was so awesome. Ultimately, the budget was big; the studio was not really sure of the title, and the relevance in the marketplace. They ended up letting it go.”

Universal proceeded to sign away the rights, which now reside with Fredrik Malmberg. In 2018, there were reports Amazon was looking at a Conan series to be overseen by Game of Thrones director Miguel Sapochnik. Then, in 2020, it emerged Malmberg was talking to Netflix about the character. Again, nothing came of that discussion – to the despair of a fanbase that includes Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“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 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,” he told fan site thearnoldfans.com.

“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.”

Or has it? Earlier this month, Malmberg appeared to contradict Schwarzenegger. He tweeted: “We spent three years with Netflix and talked to them about Arnold several times. We are now working with a major filmmaker who is great and a true Conan fan. Will share more when I can by Crom.”

Schwarzenegger is obviously frustrated. Alongside the Terminator, Conan is the character with whom Arnold is most associated. He has achieved all that he’d dreamed of when he and Oliver Stone went sunbathing in Santa Monica 40 years ago – taking over Hollywood and becoming Governor of California for good measure.

In the twilight of acting life, he wants to return to where it all began. Back to Conan, the unhappy king who has conquered the world and yet remains unfulfilled. That is Conan’s story – but also, perhaps, Arnold’s.