She's been wandering in the wilderness for a good few years, but Red Sonja has just returned to her previous home at studio Millennium / Nu Image. Development has started over on a new Sonja movie, with up-and-coming writer Christopher Cosmos set to work on the screenplay{
Sonja, is sort of a Robert E. Howard creation like Conan The Barbarian, but actually has more to do with Roy Thomas' Conan comics for Marvel. Howard's Red Son_y_a of Rogatino doesn't inhabit the same world or time period as Conan and doesn't wear a chain-mail bikini; it was Thomas that revamped her as the amazon sword-maiden we now recognise. She was previously embodied onscreen by Brigitte Nielsen in 1985, with Arnold Schwarzenegger also on-hand as the all-but Conan Prince Kalidor.
Twenty-odd years later, Sonja reared her crimson head again, in a projected film that was to star Rose McGowan, with Robert Rodriguez producing and Doug Aarniokoski (Highlander: Endgame) behind the camera. Teaser artwork was produced showing McGowan in costume, but the rest was ultimately silence.
Until 2011, that is, when Simon West signed up to direct yet another take that stalled. Producer Avi Lerner was confident that this Red Sonja would arrive in between Marcus Nispel's Conan The Barbarian and its sequel (he also told us he wanted Amber Heard for the role). But with that Conan breaking on the wheel of pain and not actually earning a follow-up at all, Sonja fell by the wayside too.
Which brings us to today. With a new Arnold-led Conan on the way from Universal we'd surmise that Nu-Image have reasoned the time is ripe for Red Sonja once again.
Cosmos is a former VP of the managament production company BenderSpink, but left to pursue his passion for screenwriting. He's since become one of those names that doesn't yet have a finished film on his CV but is definitely on Hollywood's radar. He sold the post-apocalypse thriller The Fall to QED films in 2012 and also has action film Scouts And Raiders and the comicbook spy adventure Langley High in development.
Interestingly, in the years since the stalled Simon West Sonja there's been a decent reboot of the modern Dynamite Comics series by Gail Simone. We'll see whether that has any bearing on the new film as Cosmos gets to work. We're going to say that the new Red Sonja won't mirror Legend Of Conan by picking up with an older Nielsen...