"Don't sweat it! / Get it back to you! / Overkill! Overkill! Overkill!" roared Motörhead. It's an appropriate anthem for Conan, and for Lionsgate's marketing department. There's another Conan the Barbarian clip online. We haven't quite recovered from the last one yet.
Rather than a trailer, what we've got this time is a full-blown clip from the beginning of the movie, with the young Conan taking on a tribal rite of passage. The race between nascent warriors is immediately compromised by a Pict attack, but Conan, natch, opts to continue forwards while others retreat.
There's no Jason Momoa here; this sequence showcases his junior counterpart Leo Howard (no relation to Robert E), to bloodily head-caving, limb-smashing effect. We also get a good look at Ron Perlman as Conan's father, resembling nobody more than the Bear Man from True Grit.
"After we finished the film, I went to Lionsgate and said 'Y’know, the movie to do next is Conan: The Early Years'," director Marcus Nispel told Empire recently. "Leo absolutely blew me away. I was on the plane to Bulgaria and I watched GI Joe, and this kid was there in a flashback doing sword fights, and it turned out he was a four-times world champion martial artist in his age range and had huge acting experience. He had the chops. Almost the entire first act of** Conan** is the kid, which is unheard of. At the start, reading the script, everyone was like 'We have to cut that down to ten minutes'. And now everyone’s like ‘Can we make that longer?!’ He worked out like a charm. There aren’t many young actors who could carry that sort of weight."
Of Perlman, Nispel told us: "I can’t imagine how Jason Momoa could be Ron Perlman’s son in any other circumstance, but here you can believe it! I told him he was the best caveman ever. He said 'Yeah, but you should check out Ringo Starr{
Along with Momoa, Perlman and Howard, Conan stars Stephen Lang as villain Khalar Zym, Rose McGowan as Marique the witch, and Rachel Nichols as fighting nun Tamara. It's out in the UK on August 26; expect further developments imminently from ComicCon; and there'll also be some exciting preview-age at Empire**'s Big Screen, which runs from August 12-14.