A short while ago we had word of a short­list of poten­tial Conan movie direc­tors; their spe­cialty was in hor­ror movies. The list included Christoph Gans, Neil Mar­shall and direc­tor of choice, Mar­cus Nis­pel. Nis­pel helmed the The Texas Chain­saw Mas­sacre and Fri­day the 13th remakes and more wor­ringly, the ter­ri­ble Viking movie, “Pathfinder”.

A new direc­tor was sought after Brett Rat­ner stepped down from the helm due to sched­ul­ing con­straints. The movie is likely to have a smaller bud­get and could begin pro­duc­tion as early as August this year, with reports sug­gest­ing Bul­garia as its locale.
Dirk Black­man and Howard McCain are cur­rently work­ing through Dean Don­nelly and Joshua Oppenheimer’s first draft.

An announce­ment as to who shall play Conan is expected shortly.

Brett Rat­ner, direc­tor of Rush Hour 1–3 and the deplorable X-Men: The Last Stand, has dropped off the Conan project because of sched­ul­ing con­straints. Pro­ducer Joe Gatta revealed the news to Empire:

“We’re cur­rently in the process of hir­ing a direc­tor. […] For the past six months we were dis­cussing the movie with Brett Rat­ner, and for more tim­ing issues than any­thing else we had to part ways with Brett. We all wanted him to do it, believe me; just the tim­ing didn’t work. But you never know what can happen.”

“We have a poten­tial start-date on Conan of August 24. And we’ll be shoot­ing in Bul­garia. I would say though the empha­sis is on Conan [rather than Red Sonja]. It’s our crown jewel here at the com­pany and that will be the leader. Red Sonja prob­a­bly won’t hap­pen until next year, as far as mak­ing it goes. So we want to launch Conan and rein­vent the fran­chise.“

When a direc­tor is hired an almost imme­di­ate open cast­ing call for Conan shall commence.

MTV have briefly spo­ken with Brett Rat­ner con­cern­ing the new Conan movie, Rat­ner revealed that the story shall return to its roots and the mythol­ogy of the char­ac­ters before com­ment­ing on his own involve­ment in the adaptation:

“The script is very cool, con­tem­po­rary,” Rat­ner told MTV News. “It’s not an homage. It’s not a remake, really. It’s going back to the orig­i­nal source mate­r­ial — the mythol­ogy of the characters.”

“[Screen­writ­ers Dirk Black­man and Howard McCain] just did an incred­i­ble, incred­i­ble job or else I wouldn’t be risk­ing it,” said Rat­ner. “Because I know how dif­fi­cult it is to do these movies and its some­thing that I’m really excited about.”

Latino Review have got their hands on Brett Ratner’s new Conan movie script, and to pre­vent pages of read­ing they have pre­sented it to us in a handy video fea­turette pro­duced by El May­imbe. It dis­cusses the open­ing few scenes in the movie, the main char­ac­ters and cast­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties and the film’s poten­tial as a reboot along the lines of 300:

Latino Review

Speak­ing with MTV, Brett Rat­ner revealed that he expects the new Conan lead to be an unknown actor with the poten­tial to be iconic:

“I believe it should be an unknown,” Rat­ner hinted to MTV News. “Conan is kind of iconic. It’s kind of like when you do Superman.”

“Grow­ing up, my favorite comic book was ‘Conan,’” added Rat­ner. “[It] was the first comic book I ever read.”

How­ever, Rat­ner is well aware that tak­ing the reins on an all-new “Conan” project is a task wor­thy of the bar­bar­ian him­self. After all, the orig­i­nal series of films hold a spe­cial place in fanyboy’s hearts, and replac­ing Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger in the title role is darn-near sac­ri­lege. But Rat­ner, ever the opti­mist, believes the time is right for “Conan” to pil­lage the local mul­ti­plex once again.

“Look, it’s dif­fi­cult to fill those shoes,” insisted Rat­ner, “But they came up with a new Bat­man, they came up with a new James Bond, you know?”

In Novem­ber 2008, in a flurry of excite­ment from Conan pro­ducer Avi Lerner it was announced that Brett Rat­ner would be direct­ing the 2010 Conan remake — the ini­tial state­ment in the Hol­ly­wood Reporter implied that Rat­ner had com­mit­ted him­self to the sequel, how­ever it seems that Rat­ner is still in the final phases of nego­ti­a­tion, accord­ing to the LA Times, with the screen­writ­ers pol­ish­ing the script to incor­po­rate new ideas thrown up in the discussion.

Lerner remains pos­i­tive that Rat­ner is per­fect for the job:

“He has the pas­sion and feel­ing for this project–he even wrote a story about Conan when he was 10 years old. He under­stands the char­ac­ter, he ana­lyzed the script really well. He knows how to make this a really big movie. I like his child­like enthusiasm–he almost sees these movies as won­der­ful toys. What can I say, he’s a nice, lik­able Jew­ish boy.”

Ratner’s involve­ment hinges on “a few obsta­cles,” namely “a bud­get, on how to do the spe­cial effects and exactly where we’d shoot the film.” — Early thoughts point to a stu­dio in Bul­garia and some exte­rior work in China.

But when the LA Times con­tacted Rat­ner things turned a lit­tle sour:

“I am not doing ‘Conan’ now. This is totally pre­ma­ture. For now, ‘Conan’ is only a devel­op­ment deal. I have a deal at Para­mount and I’m doing ‘Bev­erly Hills Cop [4]’ first, no mat­ter what. Avi shouldn’t be telling you or any­one else in the press what I’m doing.”

We’ll have to wait and see how this one develops.