Greetings, all. Big changes here at Conan the Movie Blog: the founder and master of the blog, Johannes “Waldgeist” Rebhan, has decided to step down as the site’s administrator. Since February of 2009, Johannes had taken it upon himself to keep the world informed about the upcoming Conan film, to debunk or confirm rumours, and provide speculation on the film’s direction. Since then, it has grown into a small community of its own, with dozens of visitors leaving hundreds of comments, and unique visitors per day numbering in the thousands.

He has bestowed upon me the keys to the castle, and tasked me with continuing to bring news of the Conan film to the fine community which has grown over the past year. Johannes wants to imparts his farewells and thanks to the commentators, viewers, and fans of the blog: he did not inform me of the reasons for his retirement, and I’m not going to speculate. Suffice to say, he’s going to miss the blog.

In the meantime, I’ll be the castellan of this keep, and will endeavour to continue Johannes’ fine work. My name is Al Harron, whom some of you might know from The Cimmerian or The Blog That Time Forgot. I’ll be posting under the name Taranaich, my user name at the Official Robert E. Howard Forums. If anyone has any questions, queries, challenges or death threats, I’ll be happy to address them in the comments when I can.

Hopefully I’ll do Johannes proud, and Conan the Movie Blog will continue to be the primary resource for Conan.

Cloigeand abu!

We’ve waited for official pictures, to spread the news and be respectful to the producers and Paradox Entertainment, so they get a chance to show off their main hero and the movie in the best way possible. They passed on that opportunity and let practically anyone spread horrible pictures, blurry, shaky mobile pictures around the world, without ever coming forward with even the same pictures, that were already leaked in high quality. Since this is a fansite for the Conan movie, we didn’t want to keep anyone waiting any longer.

So here is a collection of all Conan Set pictures, that we could find on the web so far. We apologize to Paradox Entertainment for putting this public, but we’ve waited months for better shots and at some point, we have to give the interested what they come here for: The newest info and rumour on the Conan Movie.

We will extend the Conan Set Gallery when new stuff arrives and we gladly take down all those shaky, blurry shots if Millenium or Paradox decide to put out high quality set shots and stills of the movie. We really don’t want to damage the Conan movie or it’s public appeal, but now that really every film site on the planet has leaked those shaky pictures, there is not much harm, that we can do with it.

Sometimes, something tragic happens, something that makes my heart weep and my tongue get dry in my throat within milliseconds, something that after I realized it had me silently shed a tear of respect. Dan “Painbrush” Goudey, a dear member of the official Conan boards and general REH fanatic died on the first day of the new year. A man full of life, a man as close to a real-life Conan in many ways as one can get in appearance and talk has passed on.

He is one of those unique personalities that one meets in life, that are so strong, so much larger-than-life, that they have the power to change your perception of things.

I never had the chance to meet him in real life and I am now very sad for it, because he was a guy I would have loved to bear-hug, because he had such a positively crazy personality.

Head on over to The Cimmerian, to read a very interesting and more detailed description of the guy that impressed so many people and afterwards raise your keg and drink to the shade of a literally Great Guy!

I bow my head and raise my keg and hope to hear your barbaric YAWP echoing through the misty void, when we finally meet again, somewhere, somehow… some-when.

The past few weeks have been turbulent to say the least. All fans of Conan, be it the Milius movie, the Marvel comics, the Dark Horse Comics, or of course the stories from the Master Robert E. Howard himself, got slapped in their face with the casting reveal and now with a plot synposis, that hints at a mediocre D&Dish fantasy flick at best, being far from what most of us had hoped for.

The REH community therefore organized a petition, to show, by the power of numbers, how many people would dislike a movie made off the present main plotline hinted at through the plot synposis or the casting reveal.

If you wanna join the cause, spread the word (the share button comes in handy) and sign the petition!

This is not meant to be the action of a bunch of childish upset fanboys, we really want to honestly portrait our deepest concern, through the power of numbers, that a movie like this could do serious damage not only to our REH-loving hearts, but the Conan license as a whole.

It is time we take matters into our own hands and in true Conan spirit, we have decided that we need to ask The Man Marcus Nispel himself, the questions that matter the most to us! We have absolutely no idea if this is gonna work, or if anyone will answer our humble request at an interview with the new director of the Conan Movie, but sometimes in life you have to be blunt and simply ask

But since even we are not without fault (certainly not), we wanna take your input on the matter and collect the questions from you, the Conan fans, the REH fans and create some kind of an interactive interview. We will collect questions for two weeks and then combine them together to create a neat and clean interview to send off to the powers that be, in hope to get a response to them.

So if you have an important and well versed question to throw into the pot, don’t hesitate, chop off the kings head and take the crown, so to speak, post it in the comments of this newsposting OR in the thread on the official Conan forums.

May Mitra guide your questions or Croms wrath hit you, if you post nonsens!

I was contacted by Paradox and asked to release the domain name under which this blog is currently hosted (www.conanthemovie.com), because they want to utilize it in the future as the home of an official Conan Movie homepage.

As we’ve always been in good contact i am going to follow that request and jump to another domain name called www.conanmovieblog.com. If you had any bookmarks, please change them very soon, as i expect this url to fall to Paradox in the near future. Please spread the word about this change, as i would hate to loose all the months of work to get the word around in the net about the blog – thanks!

I hope you guys will stay with us, as we will continue to be the #1 news source for the upcoming Conan Movie and the rumours spreading around on the net.

As some of you know, Fredrik Malmberg, the CEO of Paradox Entertainment, is also a producer and major player in the development of the new Conan film. A short while ago he posted on the REH Forum some interesting information, including [edited line breaks for better readability]…

Where to start… I think by saying that the reason we have not been saying much up to date is because nothing was ready. No need to comment on something which is just an internet rumour, no matter how close to the source it comes from.

Now that we are embarking on the next phase, WE can start telling some FACTS. Scripts go thru many drafts before they are finished. Believe me, I was laughing out loud when I read somewhere that people thought all Cimmerians would be wiped out by werewolves and Conan was the Chosen One to avenge all Cimmerians. No no no.

You will surely know more about the plot, characters, and environs as we progress but for now I can tell you that our writers know their REH… We [Paradox] liase with the other companies involved, Millennium and Lionsgate, so it is a large group and everyone comes from a different angle with a different role.

My angle has always been that this is R rated, that we should not have a “star” portray Conan and that we rely less on CGI. Some other executives may have a different opinion but believe me that there is too much money involved to take any decision lightheartedly. We are all making this film because we think Conan has a huge potential audience out there, and we want to keep making more movies after this one so it has to be good!

With a filmmaker [Marcus Nispel] on board, our jobs shift to support him in all his efforts. It is a giant task to direct a movie of this scope. Hopefully I can convince him to spill some information to all of you in the course of production because I know you are all hungry for it and anxious that we not screw this up. The first real opportunity is around Comicon end of July. We will see if we can get a few words before then for you guys.

That wind roaring past your window is the huge collective sigh of relief as Conan and REH fans breathe a joyful sigh of relief.  Mr. Malmberg, with a few well chosen words, has reconnected the film to its most ardent fans and certainly created a renewed and avid interest in the upcoming Conan production.

Just a short news from the creators of this blog. Another famous character of Robert E. Howard in the name of Solomon Kane has been awarded with a major motion picture, as we have been reporting in the past.

To report in more detail about this ambitious, independant film project, we have started a new blog for that purpose. If you are not only interested in a Conan movie, but also in pulp fantasy movies in general, head on over to www.solomon-kane.com and check out some of the amazing production stills have we have gathered around the internet.

We hope you like our newest effort to bring you all the news about the latest REH pastiche projects!

Some of you might have noticed the little “Share” button that suddenly appears under every article. There you will find the possibility to share every news and article over dozens of different social networks, bookmarking systems and web rating platforms.

We introduced this so you can actively spread the word of the new Conan movie on the web, because even though some specialized movie pages pick up news and rumours about the movie from time to time, the general knowledge about the reboot of the Conan franchise on the big screen has not yet spreaded much farther than the horizon of the Conan fans.

So use the possibility to spread the word of Conan and twitter, facebook, reddit, whatever… the news and articles we post, so once the movie really gets going, we can start fueling the hype actively and help reviving the Conan franchise for the big audience through word-of-mouth and viral marketing! Many don’t realize the possibilities of these tools, but statistics have shown that with every year that goes by, these channels become more and more important to people and their lives and therefore as a place to find trustworthy information, that is not blurred by the marketing machinery of the big studios (aka trailers), but rated by people like themselves.

If all goes well we will see a reboot of the Conan license in form of a movie in 2010. Because that is not so far off, we thought it is time to start a little blog that will collect all available information on exactly this topic: The new Conan movie.

Since this is not meant to be a one or two man show we encourage anyone who wastes spends his time plowing through the internet in search of news regarding this movie and Robert E. Howard in general to join our team of havoc madness and participate in making this the one and only and best place to find information on the new Conan movie.

We hope you enjoy the futur of this little project as much as we enjoy bringing it to you and that it will flourish and rise (don’t forget to bookmark it or register for the RSS!).

Cya soon!