Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 40+ Year Old Fantasy Franchise Is Officially Getting a Reboot Series

Welcome back to the times of high adventure. One of the greatest fantasy franchises in history is coming back to the screen with one of the most renowned animation creators of the modern era. The new series was announced at the Annency International Animation Film Festival.

Conan the Barbarian is coming to animation, in a new series from visionary director Genndy Tartakovsky. The announcement also includes a preview image of Conan in all his Cimmerian glory, rendered in Tartakovsky’s trademark style. Despite hailing from Cartoon Network Studios, Tartakovsky’s longtime studio home, the series is not being developed for HBO Max or Adult Swim, both of which the Warner Bros. conglomerate owns, but for Amazon’s Prime Video. Tartakovsky has rattled off a long string of hits for both Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, including Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars, and Primal; he also directed several Hotel Transylvania feature films for Sony.

Who Is Conan the Barbarian?

Conan the Barbarian was created by Robert E. Howard in a series of sword and sorcery tales published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in the 1930s. Conan is a sword-wielding brigand and mercenary in the fictional historical period known as the Hyborian Age, a time of magic and monsters. Despite Howard’s death by suicide at age 30, just four years after he’d created Conan, the character endured, first in a series of paperback collections of Howard’s stories, then in a popular comic book series published by Marvel starting in the 1970s. The character reached the apex of his popularity in the 1980s, when Arnold Schwarzenegger starred as the barbarian in two blockbuster films, elevating the bodybuilder to stardom. Jason Momoa played the character in a 2011 reboot, and Schwarzenegger plans to reclaim his mantle in King Conan, a new film chronicling the barbarian’s later days.

This won’t be Conan’s first foray into animation. In 1992, he starred in Conan the Adventurer, a syndicated animated series that pitted him against one of his oldest foes, the reptilian Serpent Men, but significantly toned down the R-rated sex and violence that are often Conan’s trademark. Given the tenor of much of Tartakovsky’s work, the new animated series will probably preserve the character’s brutality.

A new Conan the Barbarian animated series is in development. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.

Release Date

May 14, 1982

Runtime

129 minutes

Director

John Milius

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