HE’LL BE BACK

Arnold Schwarzenegger to Revive 3 of His ’80s Franchises

The former California governor said he’s in talks to return in “age-appropriate” roles.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is going back to the 1980s franchises that made him a star, according to Variety.

The former governor of California, 78, will reprise his roles in 1982’s Conan the Barbarian, 1987’s Commando, and 1987’s Predator, he revealed at the Arnold Sports Festival in Columbus, Ohio, according to the site.

“Fox Studios has kind of rediscovered Arnold,” Schwarzenegger said. The almost-octogenarian told the festival crowd that the roles will be written “age-appropriately.”

“They don’t write them like I’m 40 years old,” he said. “You write it to be age-appropriate. I’ll still go in there and kick some a--, but it will be different.”

Schwarzenegger’s rise to fame as an action star was born out of his roles in Conan, The Terminator, and similar films before he served as the Republican Governor of California from 2003 to 2011.

Over the weekend, Schwarzenegger revealed that Fox Studios had approached him to return to the roles.

“They’ve come to me and said, ‘We want you to do Predator, we just got a script for you to do Commando 2,” he explained. “They did an additional Predator, and the director [Dan Trachtenberg] has been doing a great job of that,” he said, referencing last year’s Predator: Badlands, which stars Elle Fanning.

In 1987’s Predator, Schwarzenegger plays Dutch, a U.S. soldier hired to save a group of politicians in Guatemala. “Now, he wants me to be in the next Predator. We’ve talked about it,” he added.

He also told the crowd that the studio “just hired a fantastic writer-director who did Tom Cruise’s last four movies to write and direct King Conan.” Variety reports he was likely referring to Mission Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie.

“With King Conan, it’s a great old story that Conan was 40 years as king, and now he gets forced out of the kingdom, and there’s conflict, of course, but somehow he comes back, and there’s all kinds of madness, violence, magic, creatures, and stuff like that.”

Schwarzenegger said that he’s excited to see the studio drop hordes of cash for the upcoming sequels. “Now, of course,” as opposed to when he starred in the 80s versions of the films, “There’s all kinds of special effects,” he said. “The studio has plenty of money to make those movies really big, so I’m looking forward to all of those projects.”

Schwarzenegger last appeared in 2019’s Terminator: Dark Fate, in which he reprised his role as an aging Terminator.

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Eboni Boykin-PattersonEntertainment Reporter

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