In what can only be described as the most important bit of casting news to be rumored in several months (that’s kind of a lame honor now that I type it out), Comic Book Movie has learned that the creators of the new CONAN movie are looking mostly at Daniel Cudmore and Roland Kickinger for the main role. Cudmore played Colossus in the X-MEN movies and Kickinger is best known for looking so much like Arnold that his body was used as the T-800 in TERMINATOR: SALVATION (they could have not even used Arnold’s digital face and he still would have looked the part).
I’m not sure if I really like either of these guys to be honest, though if I was going to pick one it would probably be Cudmore because if you went with a straight Arnold clone like Kickinger you’d be making the movie even more similar to the original which the new one won’t be as good as. It’s best to go in a new direction with a new looking Conan.
That is unless they want to go with my idea of having the new movie be a sequel to the Arnold movies, except with Conan being king of Aquilonia. That would acknowledge the fact that the new guys are not going to make a movie as good as CONAN THE BARBARIAN while also giving them a ton of new stories to mine. It would have the franchise turn-the-page and move forward instead of going backward and failing. They won’t do that, but at least I’ve said my peace.
