Last year, producer Avi Lerner learned that half-ass mediocre director Brett Ratner wasn’t fully committed to the project CONAN Reboot because Ratner wanted to do BEVERLY HILLS 4 first before everything else. And truth be told, I didn’t want to see Ratner helm this new take anyway because he won’t do the story justice and then he’ll throw in Chris Tucker and make Jackie Chan do cameo and just ruin the whole damn movie.
We don’t need to worry about that anymore because producer Joe Gatta talked to Empireonline.com about CONAN and RED SONJA and he revealed that Brett Ratner is NO longer attached to CONAN.
“We’re currently in the process of hiring a director,” he told us. “For the past six months we were discussing the movie with Brett Ratner, and for more timing issues than anything else we had to part ways with Brett. We all wanted him to do it, believe me; just the timing didn’t work. But you never know what can happen.”
“We have a potential start-date on Conan of August 24. And we’ll be shooting in Bulgaria. I would say though the emphasis is on Conan [rather than Red Sonja]. It’s our crown jewel here at the company and that will be the leader. Red Sonja probably won’t happen until next year, as far as making it goes. So we want to launch Conan and reinvent the franchise.”
I never thought I’d say this, but thank heavens for timings that don’t work. No word yet on who’s going to fill Arnold’s big shoes for this reboot but I wouldn’t be surprised if the new guy would get to do both movies CONAN and RED SONJA, hey, that’s what Arnold did back then.
“We’ll have an open casting call: as soon as we hire our director the search is on.”
This reboot is said to go loyal to the 1930s original stories by Robert E. Howard’s original pulp stories, they’re aiming for an R-rating presentation with a $85 Million budget production. Previous casting rumors included American Gladiator’s Mike O’Hearn as CONAN and Djimon Honsou as Thulsa Doom.. but those were just rumors.
Casting call could mean an unknown might get his big break.
Who do you think should direct CONAN and who should play the legendary Barbarian?
I’m thinking.. Patrick Tatopoulos (Underworld: Rise of the Lycans) should direct and that freak of nature from Son Of The Beach, Roland Kickinger should get the shot.
