I can't see it being as good as the original tbh, and see no reason why they should do a remake.
Reboot, remake, "New Telling" Is the in thing this year.
Conan, Thundercats, Red Sonya.. The list goes on.
Like I've pointed out before though Conan was well overdue. As totally awesome as the first Arnie film was, it was an Arnie film and not a Conan film. There's such much been written about Conan that it's nice to have something going back to the source material with a view to being more faithful to it, especially now that both technology and sensibilities have progressed enough to allow them to be envisioned properly on the big screen without constraints and without too much censorship.
It's very easy to knock the notion of these kinds of films by calling them re-makes but that's like calling Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland a remake of the 1951 Disney version. It isn't in any way, shape or form, they just happen to share a common set of source material. The original Conan had pretty much zero in common with with Robert E. Howard wrote. I'm not knocking it, like I mentioned previously it's a great film but it really isn't Conan, at the time you couldn't have adapted any of the many stories to the big screen properly without creating a spectacular flop.
Hopefully it'll be the beginning of a rather enjoyable franchise and this is one release where I hope they have their eyes set on a number of sequels as well. "New-telling" as you describe is probably the best way of describing it, you just have to be careful to not give people the impression that they are telling the same story as the Arnie film all over again.
