Despite there being a recent remake to Conan the Barbarian, the original is receiving a sequel with the one and only Arnold Schwarzenegger returning to the role that made him big — figuratively of course — he was already a big guy. Another surprise? The film will ignore Conan the Destroyer and will serve as a direct sequel to the original movie.

“You start with the wholesale slaughter and death of Conan’s village at the hand of the warlord played by James Earl Jones, and you see young Conan chained to a wheel as he becomes stronger. Then he’s a pit fighter, and later basically a stud bull before he meets the first kind person of his life, who lets him go. All of that horrific stuff happened for a reason, and then an act of kindness sends him on his journey. Will that level of violence be there? Absolutely, but only if it serves a character who lives by that barbarian law of the wild, who is capable of extreme violence and rage, but who has created his own code and operates from within it. By the end of that film, Conan became a certain character, and this film picks him up there, as he faces different challenges that include dealing with age.”

–Producer Chris Morgan

It goes without saying that I’m excited for the sequel. It’s incredibly fitting that Schwarzenegger returns to movies after all these years and revisits the role that got his acting career going.

The studio intends for a 2014 release date in the summer. And it’s pretty obvious a lot of us will be at the midnight showing.