Netflix Lost a ‘Conan the Barbarian’ Trilogy from Robert Rodriguez for a Frustrating Reason

movies was scrapped for the most frustrating reasons. Rodriguez recalled pitching his epic remake of the classic comic book legend to Netflix only to have them allow their hold on the franchise rights to lapse and kill the project. To make it worse, Rodriguez had also convinced Hollywood heavyweight James Cameron to be part of the project.

According to Rodriguez, who worked with Cameron on Alita: Battle Angel, plans for the project originally started many years ago, before the filmmaker believed technology could match his vision. He told Rogan:

“I almost did a Conan movie. I even roped James Cameron into wanting to do it. We were going to do [something similar] to what we did with [Battle Angel] Alita. I said, ‘Let’s do a Conan movie and we’ll make it look like the paintings.’ Technology wasn’t there yet and I ended up doing Sin City instead.”

Rodriguez continued to detail some of the story arc he had in mind, which would have spanned three movies and seen Conan do “different occupations.” He explained:

“It was almost built as a James Bond series- it starts with him as a thief, by the second movie he’s a buccaneer/mercenary, and the third one is when he becomes king. So the actor could grow with the role, like how Daniel Craig started with Casino Royale and by the end, he’s No Time To Die. You have to get an actor who does the whole journey. So I had a whole trilogy marked out. Netflix had it, I went and pitched it to them and then they let the rights lapse.”

Will We Ever See ‘Conan the Barbarian’ Return to Screens?

Conan the Barbarian has appeared several times on screen, most notably in ’80s movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and the panned 2011 reboot starring Jason Momoa. The timeline of Rodriguez’s attempts to bring Conan back to screens seems to have stemmed from around 2016, which is when he worked with Cameron on Alita: Battle Angel and pitched his idea for the barbarian trilogy. While the rights to Conan have been in a few hands, in 2020, they landed at Netflix, which prompted Rodriguez to take his pitch to them. It seemed that at first it was going to happen, but then the rights were lost and the project folded.

In the meantime, Amazon has also had a crack and reviving Conan, with a TV show being in the works at the streamer before Netflix acquired the rights. Now the Conan intellectual property is believed to be back in the hands of Conan Properties International (CPI), a subsidiary of Heroic Signatures. The company is also responsible for handling rights on several other creations by author Robert E. Howard, including Solomon Kane, and Kull the Conqueror.

While it is possible that someone will eventually pick up and develop a Conan project that does make it to the finish line, there have also been rumors that Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to return to the role that was part of his initial wave of success, but this time playing an older version of the comic book hero. For now though, rumors and broken hopes seems to be all any Conan fan has to hang onto right now, as no matter how people like Rodriguez have come to rebooting Conan the Barbarian, it just doesn’t seem to be happening right now.

Source: The Joe Rogan Experience