After a supporting role in last year’s action ensemble The Expendables 2, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s screen comeback steps up a gear this month with the release of Kim Jee-Woon’s The Last Stand. The action icon has several original projects on his upcoming slate (including The Tomb and Ten), after which he’s due to head back to the Hyborian Age, reprising the role of Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Cimmerian for the fantasy sequel The Legend of Conan. During a press conference for The Last Stand, I Am Rogue caught up with Arnie and managed to grab a few words about how The Legend of Conan came about.
“Let me just say that a lot of it has to do with timing. That’s what show business and politics have in common. It’s a lot of it is timing, and I think that I would’ve chosen to do Conan already if it would’ve been ready, but the Universal studio just bought the rights to Conan, they have an executive over there that happens to be a big believer in bringing back that character, and Universal was the first one to do the movie with Dino DeLaurentiis, and now they want to be back and do a bunch of Conan movies, but do it high-quality, not as a B-movie, to do it high-quality like the first one was John Milius directed and Dino DeLaurentiis produced and Universal has presented. So they want to go back to that. So that will be ready by sometime this year.”
While it’s expected that Schwarzenegger will eventually reprise his signature role of the Terminator for Terminator 5 (assuming it ever gets off the ground), there’s another sequel that seems to be high on his list of priorities – that of Triplets, the follow-up to the hit 1988 comedy Twins. The film would reunite Arnie with Danny DeVito (Batman Returns) and director Ivan Reitman (Ghostbusters), with Eddie Murphy (Beverly Hills Cop) set to join the ‘fun’ alongside Julius and Vincent.
“I have been trying to get Universal Studios to do [Triplets] for ten years,” said Schwarzenegger, who surely should have been more concerned about governing California over the past decade. “The studio executives that were there up until recently did not see the value, but now the new leadership sees the value and says, ‘This is a brilliant idea, why haven’t they done it? We want to do that.’ And so they hire the writers and they are full-blast ahead. And that’s a movie that we will be doing. So it depends on the timing. Sometimes there’s projects that are not available and then other times they are. But I would say in general you always kind of make decisions based on what movie would be interesting for people to see, what is it that the audience out there wants to see me do. And based on that you make decisions.”
Okay then, hands up – who wants to see Triplets?
