Oliver Stone spent four months writing the script for the 1982 movie Conan the Barbarian. That didn't even include the time he spent reading the comics and Robert E. Howard's other works. But his script was essentially gutted, the setting was changed, and an awful lot of plot was cut. Stone's vision would have cost around $40 million in a time when action movies took about $8 million to make. And it would have been four hours long. Even today, Oliver Stone thinks of Conan and wonders, "What if?"
Stone's idea was to place Conan the Barbarian in the future. Really. It would have been a post-apocalypse film, in a wasteland left after nuclear annihilation. That would explain the various mutant species our hero battles through the film. Stone took inspiration from the casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger, which he considered perfect. He wanted the movie to kick off a series of a dozen Conan films. In the end, there were an awful lot of people involved in the production and decisions about it. The budget was limited to $20 million, the movie plot took a more conventional route and came out at a standard length for the time, and made a respectable profit. It's become a classic, but didn't set the world on fire in its first run. Read what Conan might have been with Oliver Stone's script at Den of Geek. -via Digg