Before Total Recall, Predator, and even The Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger broke out on the big screen as a leading man in 1982 with a movie that was destined to become a cult classic. Now, over 40 years later, he’s returning to that role in a film that’s been in limbo for decades. He’s making it with the help of Mission: Impossible impresario Christopher McQuarrie, who’s set to write and direct.
According to reports, after decades of Development Hell, Schwarzenegger is set to return as Conan the Barbarian in King Conan, a film about the last days of the legendary warrior. He likens the film to Unforgiven, the elegiac movie that served as Clint Eastwood‘s farewell to the Western genre. Schwarzenegger seems to have found the right creative partner for the film; he praised McQuarrie’s understanding of both Robert E. Howard, the troubled Texan writer who created Conan and his world before his tragic death, and Frank Frazetta, the legendary fantasy artist whose evocative paintings helped shape Conan in the popular consciousness. Schwarzenegger also mooted bringing on John Milius, who co-wrote and directed the original Conan film, as a producer on the film, which is slated to begin production next year.
Collider Exclusive · Middle-earth Quiz Which Lord of the Rings Race Do You Belong To? Hobbit · Elf · Dwarf · Man · Orc
Middle-earth is home to many peoples — the courageous, the ancient, the stubborn, the ambitious, and the wretched. Ten questions will determine which race truly claims your soul. The answer may surprise you. Or it may confirm what you already suspected.
🌿Hobbit
🌟Elf
⚒️Dwarf
⚔️Man
💀Orc
01
What does your ideal day look like? How we rest reveals as much as how we fight.
02
How do you feel about the passing of time? Our relationship with mortality shapes everything we value.
03
Danger is approaching. Your first instinct is to: Fight, flight, or something in between — it’s more revealing than you’d think.
04
You stumble upon a great treasure. What do you feel? What we desire — and what we do about it — is the true test.
05
How important is community and belonging to you? No race of Middle-earth is truly alone — but some prefer it that way.
06
How ambitious are you, honestly? Ambition is neither virtue nor vice — it depends entirely on what you want.
07
Where do you feel most at home in the natural world? Middle-earth is vast — and every race has its place within it.
08
What kind of strength do you most respect? Every race defines strength differently — and they’re all at least a little right.
09
What do you want to leave behind when you’re gone? Legacy is the story we tell ourselves about why any of this matters.
10
Be honest — what do you actually want most out of life? The truest question always comes last.
Middle-earth Has Spoken You Belong To…
The race that claimed the most of your answers is your true kin. If two tied, both are shown — you walk between worlds.
◆ A TIE — YOU WALK BETWEEN TWO RACES ◆
🌿
Your Race
The Hobbits
You are, at your core, a creature of comfort, community, and quiet joy — and there is nothing small about that. Hobbits are proof that heroism does not require ambition, that the bravest heart can beat inside the most unassuming chest. You value good food, warm hearths, close friends, and a world that stays largely untroubled by dark lords and quests. When adventure does find you — and it will — you rise to it not because you sought it, but because the people you love needed you to. That is not ordinary. That is the rarest kind of courage in all of Middle-earth.
🌟
Your Race
The Elves
Ancient, graceful, and carrying a weight of memory most mortals cannot fathom, you are one of the Elves. You see the world in its fullness — its beauty, its impermanence, the unbearable ache of watching everything you love eventually fade. You pursue perfection not from pride, but because excellence is how you honour the time you have been given. Others may see you as remote or melancholy. They are not wrong, exactly. But they mistake depth for distance. You feel everything — which is precisely why you have learned to carry it so quietly.
⚒️
Your Race
The Dwarves
Stubborn, proud, fiercely loyal, and possessed of a work ethic that would exhaust most other races before breakfast — you are Dwarf-kind through and through. You do not ask for approval and you do not offer it cheaply. Your loyalty, once given, is given for life. Your grudges last longer. You love deeply and defend ferociously, and the things you build — with your hands, with your sweat, with generations of accumulated craft — are made to last. Not for glory. Because anything worth doing is worth doing properly, and you have never once done anything by half measures.
⚔️
Your Race
The Race of Men
Mortal, ambitious, flawed, and magnificent — you belong to the most complicated race in Middle-earth, and that complexity is your greatest strength. Men are capable of cowardice and extraordinary bravery, of cruelty and breathtaking sacrifice, sometimes within the same breath. You feel the urgency of your finite years, and it drives you. You want to matter. You want to leave something behind. You fall, and you rise, and the rising is what defines you. Tolkien called mortality the Gift of Men — not a curse, but a fire that burns bright precisely because it does not burn forever. That fire is you.
💀
Your Race
The Orcs
Brutal, survivalist, and contemptuous of anything that can’t defend itself — you answered with the instincts of an Orc, and there is a certain savage honesty in that. You do not dress up your desires in polite language or pretend you want things you don’t. You want power, survival, and to never be at the bottom of any hierarchy ever again. Orcs are not evil by nature — they were made from something that was once good, and broken into this shape by forces they did not choose. What remains is fierce, territorial, and deeply aware that the world is not kind. You’ve made your peace with that. The question is what you do with it.
What Is ‘Conan the Barbarian’ About?
Conan the Barbarian is set in the Hyborian Age, an ancient (and fictional) time period before “the oceans drank Atlantis.” Schwarzenegger stars as Conan, a native of the land of Cimmeria; his tribe was massacred when he was a boy, and he became a slave, then a gladiator, then a warrior, eventually winning his freedom. Befriending the archer Subotai (Gerry Lopez) and the warrior Valeria (Sandahl Bergman), he and his allies are hired by King Osric (Max von Sydow) to rescue his daughter from the deadly serpent cult of Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones). Learning that Doom was the leader of the raiders who killed his family, Conan eagerly accepts…but will pay a terrible price for his vengeance. The film was a massive success, and led to a 1984 sequel, Conan the Destroyer, which greatly toned down the original movie’s sex and violence. There have been numerous subsequent attempts to make a third Conan film; one script was repurposed as the Kevin Sorbo vehicle Kull the Conqueror.
Schwarzenegger and McQuarrie’s paths have briefly crossed before. Back when McQuarrie was an unknown and uncredited script doctor, he made revisions to Akiva Goldsman‘s script for 1997’s Batman and Robin, in which Schwarzenegger played the villainous Mr. Freeze.
King Conan is slated to begin production in 2027. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.
