Check your calendars. It’s not April 1st. Arnold Schwarzenegger is returning to the Conan franchise and the barbarian role that launched him into superstardom.

Deadline is reporting that the actor has signed onto The Legend Of Conan to be produced by by Fredrik Malmberg and Chris Morgan through Paradox Entertainment. Paradox also produced last year’s Conan which starred Jason Momoa in the title role. Unfortunately, this makes him now the George Lazenby of the Conan franchise.

Universal Studios, who released the first Schwarzenegger Conan film back in 1982, is set to distribute the film.

Morgan is quoted as stating that this film will ignore the events of both the Momoa film and the Schwarzenegger-starring 1984 sequel Conan The Destroyer. It will pick up on Conan’s later life when we see him as a king, set up by the last image of the first film. The director of Conan The Barbarian, John Milius, authored a sequel script, Conan: Crown Of Iron. That dealt with that same time period. The producers are more likely to look for a new writer for this film. But so far, no writer or director have been attached to the project, but with Schwarzenegger’s involvement, I would imagine that folks are lining up right now to talk with the producers.

Who will be the next Marvel character to hit the big screen? Which one will be the first to be produced under Marvel’s partnership with Disney? It looks like it will be Doctor Strange.

Deadline: New York is reporting that the writers of the Conan revamp, Thomas Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer, have been hired to develop the good doctor for the big screen. The pair also wrote a draft of another comic book adaptation, Cowboys and Aliens.

Dr. Strange is Stephen Strange, once an egotistical, high-profile surgeon whose practice was ruined when his hands were injured in a car accident. Losing the one thing that made him special, Strange descends a spiral of self-destruction. As a last ditch effort, he travels to a remote Himalayan village to visit a mystic to get his life back. The mystic instead train Strange to take his place as the world’s sorcerer supreme.

Of all the thousands of untapped Marvel characters, I always believed that Dr. Strange would be the best fit for the silver screen. Not only due to his origin, which I think is very interesting and cinematic in its own right, but his adventures can lead to so many different interpretations. They can be in horror–either psychological of “jump out and grab you”–or a trippy, psychedelic mind warp of a film like The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus or Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. But the property would be best served as some combination of all the above.

But who should play the doctor? Well, according to Bleeding Cool.com, Patrick Dempsey supposedly is interested in the role. The image to the right was created by Hollywood-based comic artist Arne Starr and presumably has been shown to Marvel execs to sell them on Dempsey as Doctor Strange.

Dempsey does have a relationship with Disney, having starred in their recent hit Enchanted, so his casting might not be that absurd if Disney takes a hands-on approach to Marvel’s film offerings. However, if I was the one casting, I’d go with another TV doctor. I think House‘s Hugh Laurie would be an excellent choice for the role. He is more of a physical match for the character and can definitely play that kind of role.

And where would Dr. Strange fit in with the Iron Man/Thor/Captain America: The First Avenger/Avengers shared universe thing? Well, he probably wouldn’t. Not that he couldn’t–those films are distributed by Paramount but controlled by Marvel so it’s assumed they will come over to Disney after their distribution agreement is finished. But Dr. Strange, until recently, was never a big part of the Avengers mythos in the comics. So, the best I’d think we could hope for would be a passing reference, if that.

Leo Howard, last seen this past summer as the young Snake Eyes in the flashback portions of GI Joe, has been cast in Lionsgate’s upcoming new Conan film, playing the sword-swinging barbarian as a youth. Reportedly, Howard will feature in the film’s opening 15 minutes or so, making his performance the one that will or won’t hook audiences into the picture.

With this, his role in Joe and Robert Rodriguez’s kid comedy Shorts (2009) as well as the upcoming dramedy Logan, Howard has become one of the busiest new young actors out there.

This new version of Conan, with Marcus Nispel directing, is set to start production in Bulgaria next month. Jason Momoa will be playing the adult Conan.

Via Latino Review.

Well here’s some good news. It looks like director Brett Ratner is no longer set to direct the upcoming Conan film.

Empire caught up with Conan producer Joe Gatta, who confirmed that Ratner is no longer set to helm a new adventure of writer Robert E. Howard’s barbarian swordsman.

We’re currently in the process of hiring a director. For the past six months we were discussing the movie with Brett Ratner, and for more timing issues than anything else we had to part ways with Brett. We all wanted him to do it, believe me; just the timing didn’t work. But you never know what can happen.

Even though they’re still looking for a director, Gatta is still hoping that Conan will start filming on August 24th in Bulgaria.

Of course, this still leaves Ratner free to still ruin Beverly Hills Cop IV, the Hugh Hefner bio-pic Playboy, a Boys From Brazil remake, Hong Kong Phooey, the comic book adaptations Youngblood and Harbinger and many others.

I know what you are thinking–didn’t Wolverine come from comics? Yes. he did. But in honor of May’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Marvel Comics is carpet bombing us with new Wolverine series and collections. April is the big month for this campaign, where most Marvel Comics published will feature special “Wolverine Appreciation Variant” covers, but it starts this week, as three seminal Wolvie stories–ones that tie somewhat directly into the movie–are republished in trade paperback.

If you have ever heard comic fans saying they wished the Wolverine solo film would take place in Japan, it’s partly due to this work. This trade paperback collects Logan’s first solo miniseries. The classic work by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller (yes, of Sin City, 300, and, ugh, The Spirit fame) helped define the character of Wolverine, and introduced his ties to Japan into his mythos.

While it doesn’t tie into the film, per se, it is a great story done my two creators who were in their prime. If you want to know why Wolverine is one of the most popular comic book characters today, you’ll find some answers here.

Barry Windsor-Smith is a legendary name in comics, dating back to his work on Conan the Barbarian. In 1991, Marvel gave him the honor, if you will, to reveal the mystery behind one of the lingering questions about Wolverine–how he got his Adamantium claws. That story is what composes this trade paperback.

But Windsor-Smith did more than just that. He created a shadowy government agency, a remote secret laboratory, and a big tank of mysterious liquid for the newly metal boned Wolvie to pop out of to flesh out the tale. The story, called ”Weapon X”, was serialized in Marvel Comics Presents #72-84 and inspired what little we’ve seen of the movie Wolvie’s origin in X2: X-Men United and will play a bigger role in the upcoming film.

Well, the headline pretty much sums it up, but here are the details.

The Hollywood Reporter is stating that Brett Ratner is in final negotiations to take on directorial chores for Nu Image/Millennium’s long in development Conan film. Based on the series of stories by pulp author Robert E. Howard, the script is by Sahara and A Sound Of Thunder scribes Joshua Oppenheimer and Thomas Dean Donnelly. The two writers are reportedly working on a quick polish of the screenplay to incorporate some of Ratner’s ideas. Why don’t I like the sound of that?

Meanwhile, Ratner is also pushing Paramount Studios to give him the go-ahead for Beverly Hills Cop 4, with Eddie Murphy to return to the franchise that launched his film career in the 1980s. A script for the project is currently being worked on by Wanted screenwriters Michael Brandt and Derek Haas.

The Reporter’s story also states that while Conan is closer to getting greenlit, Beverly Hills Cop 4 is actually the film more likely to go into production first, based on Murphy’s limited availability and Paramount’s desire for a summer 2010 tentpole film.

As for what Ratner may have planned for Conan, I think my good friend Rich Z., who works as a movie projectionist, summed it up best when he promised, “If Chris Tucker shows up in this, I am going to burn the print right on the platter!”

No mention has been made to any of the other projects that Ratner has been tied to recently – adaptations of the comic book Harbinger and the video game God Of War and a remake of The Incredible Shrinking Man – so perhaps they’ve been spared the pain of his hamfisted directorial “style.”

Last month, we passed along a report that Brett Ratner was one of the directors the production house Nu Image was considering to helm their upcoming Conan film. This morning, AintItCoolNews is reporting from a source that Ratner has been tapped to direct the adaptation of Robert Howard’s barbarian pulp hero.

I think there is at least a smal chance that this will not come to pass though. Within the past year, Ratner has flirted with an adaptation of the comic book Harbinger, the sequel Beverly Hills Cop 4, an adaptation of the video game God Of War and a remake of the classic The Incredible Shrinking Man. So far, there seems to be no real movement on any of these projects. I am hopeful this will be no different.

OK, Brett Ratner may not be the worst director out there. It is just that he is so blatantly average that he sucks any hope or possibility that a film under his direction will be anything else but trite pablum. He brings no style to the material he directs and the result is invariably flat and uninteresting to me as an audience member.

It is with a certain amount of annoyance that I have to pass along a report from Dread Central that Nu Image, the producers of the upcoming Conan film have approached Ratner to helm their planned film.

I have long been a fan of John Milius’ 1982 Conan The Barbarian, which captures the mood of Conan-creator Robert Howard’s original stories nearly pitch perfect. Unfortunately, he wasn’t involved with the 1984 sequel, Conan The Destroyer, as he probably would have saved it from being the silly mess that it was.