Netflix is making a Conan the Barbarian series

The Witcher, Cursed, A Letter for the King, and now Conan the Barbarian. Netflix won’t stop until it’s your one-stop shop for all things swords and sorcery.

Of late, Netflix has carved out a little fantasy niche for itself with shows like The Witcher and Cursed. Now, Deadline reports that they’re making a show based on Conan the Barbarian, further cementing themselves as the place to go if you want swords and sorcery.

In fact, the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard, first published in 1932, are credited with inventing the sword and sorcery genre. Since then, there have been lots of comics, books, movies and TV shows. The most famous depiction of Conan so far came from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who played the character in 1982’s Conan the Barbarian, which propelled him to international superstardom, and again in 1984’s Conan the Destroyer. Conan was played by Jason Momoa in a 2011 reboot, but it didn’t have nearly the same impact.

The new show doesn’t have a writer yet. Intriguingly, a couple of years back, we heard that Game of Thrones director Miguel Sapochnik was teaming with Colony creator Ryan Condal to make a Conan show for Amazon. Obviously, that didn’t happen, and Netflix landed the series. But the team of Sapochnik and Condal went over to HBO where they’re now making the Game of Thrones prequel show House of the Dragon.

I’m also reminded that, originally, Amazon was going to make an adaptation of Liu Cixin’s sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem, but that ended up at Netflix, too, and in the hands of Game of Thrones showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss, no less. It makes you wonder if Netflix outbid Amazon on a bunch of stuff a while back, or if Amazon rethought some of its decisions, or something.

Anyway, we don’t know when the new Conan show will come along, but I wouldn’t expect it anytime soon. If you’re a young bodybuilder looking for your big acting break, it might be time to poke your agent.

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