Conan movie on track with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mission: Impossible director

And Schwarzenegger is in it!

Arnold Schwarzenegger has revealed that he's returning to one of his most famous roles with an A-list director. The legendary action star says that Conan the Barbarian is set to return in King Conan, written and directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who made the last four Mission: Impossible films. According to Schwarzenegger's comments, the project is in development at Disney's 20th Century Studios arm.

"They just hired a fantastic writer/director who did Tom Cruise’s last four movies," Schwarzenegger told TheArnoldFans. "They just hired him to write and direct King Conan." Schwarzenegger described the movie as "a great old story that Conan was 40 years as King, and now he gets forced out of the kingdom and there’s conflict, of course, but somehow he comes back, and there’s all kinds of madness, violence, magic, and creatures, and stuff like that."

King Conan, named after a short story collection by Conan creator Robert E. Howard, was rumored to be in development in the late 1990s, but the project was put to an end by Schwarzenegger's election as governor of California. There was another attempt to put Schwarzenegger back in the role in a film titled Legend of Conan in the 2010s, but that one fell apart, too.

Schwarzenegger is now 78 years old, and not quite the 35-year-old hulk who appeared in the original 1982 Conan the Barbarian, directed by John Milius and co-written by Milius and Oliver Stone. Addressing his age, Schwarzenegger said, "Now, what they do is that they write the part. They don’t write them like I’m 40 years old, you write it to be age-appropriate. I’ll still go in there and kick some ass, but it will be different."

While King Conan would be a long-awaited homecoming for Schwarzenegger, it would represent a notable break for McQuarrie, who has spent the past 12 years and eight movies in an almost exclusive mind-meld with Tom Cruise. The Usual Suspects writer met Cruise on the 2008 thriller Valkyrie and has directed, written, or produced 10 Cruise movies, including the Jack Reacher films, Edge of Tomorrow, and Top Gun: Maverick. His first two Mission: Impossible movies, Rogue Nation and Fallout, are considered the creative and commercial high point of the series.

Conan is apparently not the only classic role that 20th Century Studios wants Schwarzenegger to return to. The star said that current Predator franchise king Dan Trachtenberg has plans for him to come back to the sci-fi action series he originated, and that 20th Century Studios has even developed a script for a sequel to the 1985 action pot-boiler Commando.