Since we lack news, we can also start some discussions and the most obvious one is “Who should play Conan?”. Here are some hints the producers have given us what and who they search for, so you don’t throw too many Triple H’s and Geralt Butler at us:

• Has to be an unknown, or actor that has not yet had his first major role in a big movie
• No bodybuilder
• No wrestler
• Must be suting for a young Conan
• Must be a good actor in the first place

Head over to the comments and throw around your ideas. My personal favorite right now would be Josh Holloway, he plays Sawyer in the TV-series Lost and his character in there is already a good bit similar to a modern day Conan. What do you think?

From now on we will try to gather as much data on the conan movie as possible and store these facts in the newly created conan movie fact list. We will add anything that is set in stone or confirmed by an official source or things that are on top of the rumors and are most likely to come true. If you come across any piece of information thats missing there, please contact us through the various described possibilities (der.waldgeist – at – gmail.com / PM in conan.com forum / PM in ageofconan.com forums) and tell us about it.

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Again Mr. Brett Ratner, the man of a thousand projects, talks to MTV about the new Conan Movie and this time about the script in question. He still does not say that he is with the project, but the specifies that the script he looked at was written from Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain and not from the other ones. He also states that he is very close to a descision on the project and that the script is close to the original.

Now we don’t know how familiar Ratner is with the original works of REH, but at least he pretends that the script is close to the original and therefore the latest rumored script might not be the one they are going to make into a movie in the end.

If Ratner really takes on the Conan project, he better puts all his effort into it, because the hungry Conan fans are barbaric by nature and if he treats their baby like X-Men 3, he might end up getting his head chopped off… metaphoricly speaking of course

As reported in the official Conan boards a British production company, also consisting of people who created the Rome TV series, are planning to pursue a TV series based on Robert E. Howard’s Conan short stories.

Due to Copyright reasons they are going to use the Public Domain stories as the source for the series, to avoid any trouble with CPI and not use the Conan name in the advertisement or title of the treatment. As reported by an associate of the group the usage of the name Conan in the series itself is not prohibited, since it is a very common Gaelic name.

The present working title for the first treatment is supposed to be “Robert E Howard’s The Devil In Iron” and they plan to make it with a 90 minute length. Not much more than these outlines are known yet as the project itself is in its early stages.

To me this sounds very interesting as the adaptation of the REH stories directly points out to be much closer than any movie can ever go, due to different market, costs and structure of a series compared to a full feature film. The fact that creatives from Rome are involved spawns even more hope, because i personally thought the series was done with the right production values and had the right detail to characters and setting that many movies cannot afford due to time limitations (recent example Watchmen, which is a great movie but feels a bit “stuffed”).

Solomon Kane is another one of Robert E. Howards more famous characters he created in his short stories and poems. Just as Conan he is kind of a bad-ass and the stories itself are just as action packed and well written, so i thought i give you an update on the status of this REH movie.

As the director of the new upcoming Solomon Kane film wrote on his private blog, the new Solomon Kane film has reached the last stage of active, creative work: the sound mixing. He is spending some time personally in the sound studio  in London to supervise the mixing of the several hundreds of sound layers per scene. In the last weeks and months he has continuously posted little articles talking about the movie on his blog, including some set shots that give a little hint on the quality of the set design and it looks amazing.

Lets hope once Conan has a director he will be just as passionate and into the whole production as Bassett is on Solomon Kane and maybe gives us small insights on the production via a blog too, since those views through the keyhole are really what make a “production” more personal and interesting to follow than just official news and trailers.