In Novem­ber 2008, in a flurry of excite­ment from Conan pro­ducer Avi Lerner it was announced that Brett Rat­ner would be direct­ing the 2010 Conan remake — the ini­tial state­ment in the Hol­ly­wood Reporter implied that Rat­ner had com­mit­ted him­self to the sequel, how­ever it seems that Rat­ner is still in the final phases of nego­ti­a­tion, accord­ing to the LA Times, with the screen­writ­ers pol­ish­ing the script to incor­po­rate new ideas thrown up in the discussion.

Lerner remains pos­i­tive that Rat­ner is per­fect for the job:

“He has the pas­sion and feel­ing for this project–he even wrote a story about Conan when he was 10 years old. He under­stands the char­ac­ter, he ana­lyzed the script really well. He knows how to make this a really big movie. I like his child­like enthusiasm–he almost sees these movies as won­der­ful toys. What can I say, he’s a nice, lik­able Jew­ish boy.”

Ratner’s involve­ment hinges on “a few obsta­cles,” namely “a bud­get, on how to do the spe­cial effects and exactly where we’d shoot the film.” — Early thoughts point to a stu­dio in Bul­garia and some exte­rior work in China.

But when the LA Times con­tacted Rat­ner things turned a lit­tle sour:

“I am not doing ‘Conan’ now. This is totally pre­ma­ture. For now, ‘Conan’ is only a devel­op­ment deal. I have a deal at Para­mount and I’m doing ‘Bev­erly Hills Cop [4]’ first, no mat­ter what. Avi shouldn’t be telling you or any­one else in the press what I’m doing.”

We’ll have to wait and see how this one develops.