Two New Writers Take on ‘Conan’

Screenwriters Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain have been signed by Lionsgate to write a new script for the ‘Conan’ movie the company has been wanting to make for a few years now.   The two have just finished work on the screenplay for ‘Amazon’ about female warriors.   They were brought in by Lionsgate to work separate from the two screenwriters already working on ‘Conan’, Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer.

Lionsgate has evidently put ‘Conan’ on the fast-track hoping to turn it into a franchise by making it a $100 million, R-rated origin film.

Blackman and McCain are planning to go back further than the 1982 Schwarzenegger film for their source material.   They are pulling the story from the original 1930s pulp stories written by Robert E. Howard.

Producer Fredrik Malmberg says, “Fans expect these types of movies to be more true to the source material.   There’s no reason there couldn’t be a Conan movie every two years.”

As for the direction the character of Conan will take, Malmberg said this: “He has to be a badass, but we also have to like him.”

No director has been announced or even rumoured about as of yet.   Blackman and McCain previously wrote the screenplays for the upcoming film’s ‘Outlander’ and ‘Underworld: Rise of the Lycans’.