Now that everyone knows that there’s a huge audience to muscle in on following Game Of Thrones final season, it seems that Amazon are hoping to hedge their bets.
Not only are they investing a huge sum of money into adapting Lord of The Rings to the small screen, they’re now also doubling down on the bid budget fantasy action with a reboot of Conan The Barbarian.
Taking the franchise back to its roots – and hopefully far, far away from the 2011 cinematic version – the series will focus on retelling the origins of the character laid out in Robert E. Howard’s books.
Deadline reports that the Amazon Prime series is being helmed by Colony co-creator Ryan Condal, and has some serious fire-power behind the camera with Game of Thrones director Miguel Sapochnik.
Sparks of hope should be further kindled by the fact that Fargo and The Handmaid’s Tale executive producer Warren Littlefield is also attached.
Condal is most famous to date for Colony, which now is now into its third series, as well as his projects with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson – namely Hercules and Rampage.
Meanwhile Sapochnik won an Emmy and DGA Award for outstanding directing for the Game of Thrones episode Battle of the Bastards.
Fans of GOT will remember the episode for its high body count and masterful set battle pieces, as well as Rickon Stark’s brutal murder.
Conan was first adapted on a big budget back in the early eighties with non-other than Arnold Schwarzenegger as the titular barbarian warrior.
Sadly there’s no word on whether or not Arnie will be making a cameo in the series.
Though hopefully the show runners will steer clear of making the same mistake Marcus Nispel made with his reboot of the Conana franchise in 2011.
Despite casting Jason Momao, Ron Pearlman, and Rose McGowan the film was slated by the critics and left many fans unimpressed.
Conan may have its own difficulties to face before it even gets off the ground as Amazon have already spent big money on Lord of The Rings – with several Amazon Original projects having been pulled to make way for it.
Amazon studios is believed to have spent $1 billion all-in-all to get the multiseries off the ground.
Conan and LOTR look set to face some big competition from Netflix though, as the rival streaming service has a fantasy series based on The Witcher in the works – which is already being mooted as the perfect replacement for Game Of Thrones.
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