Arnold Schwarzenegger, 79, was asked about three different franchise sequels on Wednesday’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! and gave the same answer to all three. He will show up for Predator, Commando and Conan the moment somebody hands him a finished script.
“I’m looking forward to see the scripts, because that’s where the action is,” he said. “You know what’s not on the page is not on the stage. So I just wait for the scripts to be perfected and then we go and start shooting those things.” That sentence is doing a lot of work, because of the three projects he named, exactly one has a director and a year attached, and it is not the one with the better box office track record.
King Conan is that one. Deadline confirmed on March 9 that 20th Century Studios has it in development with Christopher McQuarrie, director of the last four Mission: Impossible films, attached to write and direct (reps for the studio declined to comment, which is standard but worth noting given how far along this sounds otherwise). Two months later, on the 44th anniversary of the 1982 original, Schwarzenegger told TheArnoldFans that shooting starts in 2027, a date THR reported off the star, not the studio.
On Kimmel he filled in the premise. “King Conan is a Conan who is my age and has been king for 40 years,” he said. “He has become somewhat complacent so they want to overthrown him and get rid of him.” He also admitted the obvious about playing it: “To do all this action and the sword fighting and horseback riding and all this stuff is not as easy anymore today than it was 40 years ago,” he said on the same broadcast.
The comparison he keeps reaching for is Unforgiven, and it has a history. Universal already tried this once: in the early 2010s the studio held the Conan rights and had Fast & Furious writer Chris Morgan develop an Unforgiven-style older Conan that never got made. A new writer and a new studio does not erase that this exact idea has died before.
Predator is the louder thread with the shakier footing. Predator: Badlands has earned $184,561,056 worldwide since opening Nov. 7, 2025, the franchise’s best gross ever not adjusted for inflation (the series started in 1987, so that caveat carries weight). It still fell short of $200 million, and IGN noted in September that a follow-up “always felt like it was on a knife edge.” What exists beyond the box office is a tease: the extended cut of Predator: Killer of Killers put Dutch in stasis alongside Danny Glover’s Mike Harrigan and Prey’s Naru, and producer Ben Rosenblatt called getting Schwarzenegger back “the holy grail of Predator movies,” adding that director Dan Trachtenberg has met with him more than once.
Dread Central’s rundown of the Kimmel segment covers the same ground.
https://x.com/DreadCentral/status/2120950221559496765
Trachtenberg’s calendar is the problem. He signed a three-year first-look deal at Paramount in February and is already developing a Sleeping Beauty-inspired film at Disney on top of a secret Paramount project.
Commando 2 reached the furthest on paper and still has nothing on the calendar. Schwarzenegger said in March that 20th Century had already sent him a script for it, which THR reported at the time. Eight months later, no start date has surfaced.
What this probably means: McQuarrie’s schedule, not Schwarzenegger’s willingness, is the real gate on a 2027 King Conan. He was set to begin shooting an untitled Denzel Washington thriller in New Jersey this month for an Oct. 1, 2027 release and is also setting up a Battlefield film at Sony with Michael B. Jordan. Squeezing a Conan shoot into 2027 means finishing the screenplay before that window closes, and nobody involved has said it exists yet.
The next date that is actually locked is Dec. 2, when The Man with the Bag, with Schwarzenegger as Santa and Alan Ritchson co-starring, lands on Prime Video. Everything after that is waiting on pages nobody has confirmed are written.
