Update on Conan reboot

[GreenScar]

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If Paramount Pictures wants Beverly Hills Cop IV completed within the next two years, they're going to have to move forward without director Brett Ratner. He's been weighing his options between a new R-Rated Axel Foley installment and a re-imagining of Conan the Barbarian and the latter won out. Nu Image/Millennium and Lionsgate are prepping this to be a hard R-rated approach to Robert E. Howard's character with hopes of getting the film into theaters sometime in 2010.

Ratner liked what he saw within the Conan script by Joshua Oppenheimer and Thomas Dean Donnelly, who looked to Robert E. Howard's original pulp stories of the 1930s to create their take on the character. The writers are doing a quick polish to incorporate some of Ratner's ideas.

Joe Gatta and Avi Lerner of Millennium Films are producing, along with Paradox Entertainment president and CEO Fredrik Malmberg.

Preproduction is already under way for the $85 million shoot at Nu Image's Nu Boyana Studio in Bulgaria with an eye towards making a new franchise of films based around the warrior.

"The story opens on the battlefield where Conan is born and tells the origin story that sets the stage for what will be the first of multiple films," Lerner said.