Genndy Tartakovsky Has Wanted to Make This Conan Series Since 2007 And It’s Finally Happening.

A Conan the Barbarian animated series is now in active development for Prime Video, with Genndy Tartakovsky as executive producer and showrunner, produced by Cartoon Network Studios and anchored on Robert E. Howard’s Queen of the Black Coast. The announcement arrived June 24. It has been eighteen years coming.

Fred Malmberg, founder of Heroic Signatures, first sat down with Tartakovsky to discuss a Conan project in 2007. The original vision was a 2D animated film. They pitched it to Lionsgate, who at the time distributed Marvel’s animated movies. Tartakovsky estimated the budget at roughly three million dollars. The Lionsgate executive told them the ceiling for a Marvel animated film was four hundred thousand. That was the end of the conversation.

For the next decade and a half, the project stayed alive as an ambition that kept colliding with the same wall: the American market didn’t believe adult animation could carry a property like Conan at the quality level the material demanded. Castlevania changed that calculation. Primal confirmed it. The market moved, and Tartakovsky was standing exactly where he needed to be when it did.

For those who don’t know his work: he is arguably the best animation director working in America. He created Dexter’s Laboratory and Samurai Jack for Cartoon Network — the latter an Emmy-winning series about a samurai displaced in time, fighting through surreal landscapes with a visual language borrowed more from Kurosawa than from Saturday morning television. He directed the original Star Wars: Clone Wars micro-series, the 2003-2005 run that remains the gold standard for what Star Wars action looks like in animation. He directed all three Hotel Transylvania films. And he created Primal — the wordless, Emmy Award-winning adult animated series following a Neanderthal and a Tyrannosaurus Rex that became one of the most critically acclaimed animated shows of the last decade, earning a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes across multiple seasons.

Primal demonstrated that Tartakovsky could convey emotion of immense magnitude through nothing but visual composition, facial expression, and score, without his leads ever speaking a word. That ability maps directly onto what Conan demands. Howard’s Conan is not a talker. He is a presence. Getting that right on screen requires exactly what Tartakovsky does better than anyone else in American animation.

The story Tartakovsky selected to anchor the first season is Queen of the Black Coast, arguably the most emotionally demanding story Robert E. Howard ever wrote about the character, and the one that reveals more about who Conan actually is than any other single work in the canon. The story opens with Conan killing his way out of a courtroom rather than betray his companions. He ends up on a merchant vessel, meets Bêlit — the pirate queen of the Black Coast — and the two spend three years raiding the seas together. The dynamic Howard wrote between them is one of two apex predators who recognize each other and choose partnership and love over competition. Conan articulates his theology of Crom: the god of the Cimmerians gives you the breath in your lungs and the strength in your arms at birth, and that is the entire gift. There is no afterlife and no favor to be earned through prayer. It is the most complete window into Conan’s interior life Howard ever committed to the page. Then dark sorcery threatens everything, and Conan defies gods and death to save her.

The choice of this story over a straightforward action showcase tells you what kind of series this will be. Tartakovsky is not making Conan as spectacle. He is making Conan as tragedy.

While no exact release date exists yet, outlines and scripts are in progress, and the creative material that has come together so far is, by every account, exceptional. Two Conan panels at San Diego Comic-Con are planned where more information will be shared.

This announcement lands at a moment when Conan’s IP has genuinely become active again after decades of false starts. King Conan, the live-action sequel with Arnold Schwarzenegger directed and written by Christopher McQuarrie, will begin production in 2027 at 20th Century Studios. Schwarzenegger described the premise himself: “For 40 years he has been king, he is older now. He is no longer in the shape he was from his heyday and now people are trying to take him out.” He compared it to Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven — an aging warrior who has grown tired of the weight of what he is, forced back into it one last time. McQuarrie, who has directed Tom Cruise’s last four Mission: Impossible films, brings genuine action craft credibility to the project.

Those are the good Conan news items. The bad one arrived last year as a reminder of what can go wrong.

Red Sonja, the long-gestating adaptation of Howard’s warrior woman, received a limited one-day theatrical release in the United States on August 13, 2025, followed immediately by VOD. That release pattern is the industry’s equivalent of a quiet burial. Prior to the film’s release, lead actress Matilda Lutz said the film would differ in tone from the “male gaze” of the comics and present “a completely different story.” The Guardian gave it two stars, describing it as a “soggy, CGI-infused, low-budget confection.” IMDb users gave it a 4.6. The film spent years in development hell — Bryan Singer was attached and removed after sexual assault allegations, Jill Soloway came on and left, multiple scripts were rewritten, and the end result reflected every one of those production problems.

The lesson Red Sonja offered is the same lesson the Conan fandom has been trying to teach Hollywood for forty years: these characters work when they are treated on their own terms. Howard’s Conan is not a redemption arc. He is not a feminist allegory. He is not a commentary on power structures. He is a man of enormous physical and moral force operating in a world that is exactly as brutal as he is, and finding freedom and meaning in that collision. The Queen of the Black Coast is a love story between two people who are both killers, and it ends in loss that Conan carries for the rest of his life.

Tartakovsky understands that. He has been trying to make this for eighteen years because he understands it. The market has finally caught up to him.

Whether the series honors the source material will be known once production moves further along and footage surfaces. The story selection is encouraging. The director is the best possible choice. The platform has the budget and the appetite for adult animation that did not exist in 2007. Every variable that blocked this project for eighteen years has resolved.

That is more than can be said for most things in Hollywood right now.

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