Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...

”Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought and why we died. All that matters is that today, two stood against many. Valor pleases you, so grant me this one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, the HELL with you!”

Well, kids, you can pretty much put to bed the dream of Arnold Schwarzenegger ever donning the CROWN OF IRON and praying to Crom again. Warner Bros. is moving forward with what sounds like a complete restart of the CONAN franchise. In a way, I get it. I loved the John Milius script for KING CONAN, but it was a direct reaction to the 1982 CONAN THE BARBARIAN that Milius wrote and directed, and without the Governator, it just wouldn’t feel complete. It was a demanding script, and the studio just wasn’t up for that particular interpretation. They flirted briefly with Robert Rodriguez as writer/director, and I can tell you from my conversations with Robert that he really does love and understand the character, and his version might well have been amazing. He’s still got that non-guild thing going on, though, which makes it hard for the studios to hire him on these projects.

So somewhere along the way, Boaz Yakin snuck in there and pitched Warner Bros. a version that they really liked, and now he’s been hired as a writer and possible director, according to the story that broke in VARIETY. Word is he’s going to go back to the Robert E. Howard source material to create something very faithful to those stories. And here’s where I find myself conflicted. Yeah... I loved CROWN OF IRON on the page. And, yeah, I’d love to see Milius finish out what he started. But there’s another part of me that adores the Robert Howard stories, and the thought of a faithful adaptation of those stories gets me all giddy. So right now, I’m going to cross my fingers and hope for the best and play my Basil Pouledouris soundtrack album a whole bunch and dream of a great CONAN movie for 2008.