A while back, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gave new marching orders to his company’s video arm. The gist: Bring me the next Game of Thrones. The company cancelled smaller shows like Zelda Fitzgerald biography Z: The Beginning of Everything so it could focus on landing big sci-fi/fantasy properties that had a chance of becoming broadly popular. Since then, they’ve co-produced Britannia, a sprawling historical fiction show about the early days of the British Isles; and committed to spending upwards of a billion dollars to create a show based on The Lord of the Rings. Will any of these turn out to be “the next Game of Thrones,” whatever that means? I don’t know, but Amazon is trying really hard to make it happen.
Which brings us to this: In their epic quest to find a Game of Thrones killer, Amazon has ordered a series based on the character of Conan the Barbarian, originally called Conan the Cimmerian, who appeared in a series of fantasy stories by Robert E. Robert published in Weird Tales magazine starting in 1932. Conan is a rugged warrior who wanders the Earth fighting monsters and saving damsels and stuff. The character was most famously brought to life by Arnold Schwarzenegger in a pair of movies from the ’80s. You can see some footage from Conan the Destroyer below, spliced together with footage from a very different movie. See if you can spot the break:
What’s more, Game of Thrones director Miguel Sapochnik will executive produce the show alongside Colony co-creator Ryan Condal and The Handmaid’s Tale executive producer Warren Littlefield. Sapochnik, the guy behind such seminal Game of Thrones episodes as “Hardhome” and “Battle of the Bastards,” will direct episodes of the Conan show, because of course he will.
He won’t do it anytime soon, though — Sapochnik is directing two of the six episodes of Game of Thrones’ final season. We probably won’t see anything of the Conan show for a while. It will join Amazon’s Lord of the Rings show and the forthcoming TV adaptation of The Kingkiller Chronicles as part of the post-Game of Thrones wave of fantasy TV. It’ll be very interesting to see what rises and what falls.
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h/t Deadline
