Fantasy heroes these days love a quip, or just talking their way out of trouble, but you know what? Sometimes you just want an enormous Austrian man with a badass sword, a tiny loin cloth, and the most basic desire to kill the ever-loving heck out of the guy responsible for murdering his family. And when you throw in an evil snake cult and one of the greatest fantasy scores ever recorded, you’ve got 129 wonderfully excessive minutes of the most pure 1980s’ fantasy imaginable.
Forty-four years after its original release, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan the Barbarian has officially landed on Netflix in the United States. John Milius’ (Red Dawn) R-rated sword-and-sorcery epic joined the service on September 1, putting the movie that helped turn Schwarzenegger into a major Hollywood star back in front of streaming audiences.
Things don’t exactly begin well for Conan. His parents are murdered by the forces of Thulsa Doom, and the young survivor is enslaved for years, first enduring the Wheel of Pain before eventually becoming a formidable fighter. Freedom gives him the opportunity he’s been waiting for, and Conan heads out across the Hyborian Age to find Doom, solve the “riddle of steel,” and take revenge on the man responsible for destroying his family.
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The cast is led by Schwarzenegger as Conan, alongside James Earl Jones (Star Wars) as Thulsa Doom, Sandahl Bergman (Red Sonja) as Valeria, Gerry Lopez as Subotai, Mako (The Sand Pebbles) as the Wizard, Max von Sydow (The Exorcist) as King Osric, Ben Davidson (Necessary Roughness) as Rexor, and Sven-Ole Thorsen (Predator) as Thorgrim.
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Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood
Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance.
💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power)
👒Grand Line(One Piece)
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🐺The Continent(The Witcher)
🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson)
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01
What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic.
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02
Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own.
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03
Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live.
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04
How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse.
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05
There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark.
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06
Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does.
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07
What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it.
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08
A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world.
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The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…
Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life
looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in
return.
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The Rings of Power · Prime Video · Since 2022
Middle-earth
You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and
somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right
thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.
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This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat,
fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost
everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives
every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.
One Piece · Manga since 1997 · Netflix 2023
The Grand Line
You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where
you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is
finding out what is over there.
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One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who
each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off
somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land
harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of
it.
The Witcher · Netflix · Since 2019
The Continent
You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The
Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the
people are where it all gets complicated.
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Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is
a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the
Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a
rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story
got told wrong.
Percy Jackson · Disney+ · Since 2023
Camp Half-Blood
You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and
you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as
everybody kept telling you.
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Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners,
which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for
something nobody thought to test for.
The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud
every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you
difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.
How Good Is ‘Conan the Barbarian’?
Conan the Barbarian wasn’t exactly showered with universal acclaim in 1982, but four decades have been rather kind to it. The movie currently holds a 68% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, while audiences are slightly more enthusiastic at 74%. The site’s consensus singles out its gritty action and Schwarzenegger’s endlessly quotable performance, even while acknowledging that Milius’ movie occasionally takes all this barbarian business extremely seriously. The movie was a commercial success, too. Produced for around $20 million, Conan the Barbarian ultimately earned roughly $69 million worldwide and helped establish Schwarzenegger as a viable movie star two years before The Terminator changed his career completely.
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Conan the Barbarian is streaming now on Netflix in the United States.
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Release Date
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May 14, 1982
Runtime
129 minutes
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Director
John Milius
Writers
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Oliver Stone, John Milius, Robert E. Howard, Edward Summer
Producers
Buzz Feitshans, Raffaella De Laurentiis, Dino De Laurentiis
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