We had the McConaissance. Michael Keaton had a full-fledged Keaton Komeback with Spotlight and Birdman. Is it time for the Schwarzeneggeresurgence?
(I’ll keep workshopping that.)
According to the man himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger is in high demand at Hollywood studios for a series of sequels based on some of his most beloved ’80s movies. Speaking over the weekend at his Arnold Sports Festival, Schwarzenegger said that Fox “has kind of like rediscovered Arnold” recently.
“They come to me and say ‘We want to do Predator. We just got a script for you to do Commando 2.”
Predator, directed by John McTiernan, introduced the world to the sci-fi monster who hunted man for sport, in a combination o The Most Dangerous Game and Alien. Schwarzenegger starred as elite military operative Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer in the first film. While Predator spawned a long-running franchise that continued to this day — it received two new films in 2025 — he has never appeared in any of the sequels outside of a brief, wordless, animated cameo in last summer’s Predator: Killer of Killers.
Commando, directed by Mark L. Lester, featured Arnold as an unstoppable soldier who comes out of retirement to rescue his kidnapped daughter from terrorists. With over the top action and one-liners, Commando has become one of Schwarzenegger’s defining ’80s action films.
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Schwarzenegger also alluded to ongoing interest in a project he has long said will happen, a third Conan the Barbarian movie, tentatively titled King Conan and based on the short epilogue to the original film from 1982.
Schwarzenegger also said that “a fantastic writer/director [had been hired] to write and direct King Conan” who has worked on Tom Cruise’s last four movies. (That wound seemingly have to be Christopher McQuarrie, who made all the most recent Mission: Impossible films.)
Schwarzenegger added that this Conan will be “age appropriate … I’ll still go in there and kick some ass and stuff like that, but it will be a little bit different. With King Conan, of course, it’s a great old story where Conan was 40 years king and he gets complacent now he gets forced out of the kingdom slowly, and then there’s conflict, of course, and then somehow he comes back and there’s all kinds of madness, violence, magic and stuff like that.”
Schwarzenegger’s last theatrically-released movie to date was 2019’s Terminator Dark Fate, a sequel to yet another of Schwarzenegger’s beloved franchises. Since then he’s made two seasons of the Netflix spy series FUBAR, and voiced a character on the animated series Superhero Kindergarten. He also played the role of Santa Clause in a yet-to-be-released Christmas comedy for Amazon called The Man With the Bag.
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Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky