Conan The Barbarian Is Getting A Revival From The Perfect Showrunner
And it’s coming soon to Prime Video.
Every TV subgenre has its stalwarts. Teen soaps and superhero shows have Greg Berlanti, campy dramas have Ryan Murphy, and TV westerns have Taylor Sheridan. But when it comes to epic animated series, one name springs to mind: Genndy Tartakovsky.
The animator was the mastermind behind multiple hit animated series like Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, and Star Wars: Clone Wars. But now, he’s moving on to a project that he’s wanted to make for almost 20 years: a reboot of the classic story of Conan the Barbarian. Here’s everything you need to know about the newly announced animated revival Conan the Barbarian.
Genndy Tartakovsky is finally getting to make a Conan the Barbarian animated series.
According to The Wrap, Tartakovsky announced a new Conan the Barbarian animated series at the 2026 Annecy International Animation Film Festival. In a pre-taped message to the crowd, he revealed just how long he’s had this dream — he first pitched the idea in 2008, but it didn’t find a home until recently with Prime Video. However, just because it’s found a home doesn’t mean it will move any quicker, as this project has just entered development.
Robert E. Howard’s classic fantasy hero is a perfect fit for Tartakovsky, whose works have only gotten more ambitious and vast in scale. His most recent animated series, the prehistoric-set adult action series Primal, has plenty of Conan-esque traits, especially with its ultra-macho protagonist.
Conan the Barbarian was brought to life first in live-action films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1982 and 1984.
Conan the Barbarian is no stranger to the animated medium. From 1992 to 1993, Conan the Adventurer aired for 65 episodes, and that was followed by Conan and the Young Warriors, which only aired for 13 episodes in 1994. It may be early in the process, but it’s safe to say that this series will differ. Those were very by-the-book Saturday morning fantasy cartoons in the vein of He-Man, while Tartakovsky is known for more narrative-based, serialized adventures that will likely bring the story back to its 1934 origins in Weird Tales.
We may not know much about this series, but we do have a logline: “After finding love in the pirate queen, Bêlit, a battle-hardened Conan defies gods, fate and even death to save her from a dark sorcery that threatens to destroy everything.” If anything, this sounds like an Orpheus and Eurydice mystical tale of love and vengeance — just what you’d expect from a Tartakovsky series. It may take a while before we see this project on our screens, but it sounds like the perfect combination of artist and source material.
