Red Sonja is a 1985 American epic sword-and-sorcery film directed by Richard Fleischer, and written by Clive Exton and George MacDonald Fraser.

The film introduces Brigitte Nielsen as the title character, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sandahl Bergman, Paul Smith and Ronald Lacey in supporting roles.

Answering Sonja's cry for revenge, a female spirit appears and gives her heightened sword-fighting skills on the condition that she never lie with a man unless he defeats her in fair combat.

At a nearby temple, Varna, Sonja's sister, is in an order of priestesses preparing to banish the Talisman, a mystical light-powered relic that created the world and all living things.

Varna watches Gedren steal the Talisman and throw the surviving priestesses in the vault that contained it, before escaping, but is mortally wounded.

Using the Talisman to conjure a storm, she forces Sonja's group to take shelter in a watery cavern in Ictyan where Gedren's dragon-like “Killing Machine" is unleashed.

Ikol, realizing Gedren is insane when she refuses his pleas to stop using the unstable relic, plans to escape with bags of Hablock's gold.

Sonja confronts Gedren in her council chamber and kills her wizard, while Kalidor and Falkon deal with her guards in the castle's dining hall.

Production was pushed back a year and Bakshi was replaced with Richard Fleischer, who also directed the previous Robert E. Howard adaptation featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger Conan the Destroyer.

On a 2015 episode of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, soap opera actress Eileen Davidson revealed that she auditioned for the role and was actually runner-up to Brigitte Nielsen.

It took De Laurentiis almost a year to find an actress "Amazonian" enough to play the title character; he was still looking, eight weeks before the scheduled production, when he saw Brigitte Nielsen on the cover of a fashion magazine.

The 21-year-old native of Helsingør, Denmark, in Milan for a modeling job, soon found herself on a plane heading for Rome and a successful screen test.

[8] George MacDonald Fraser, who had recently adapted Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas for De Laurentiis, was hired to work on the script during filming.

[10] Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a score of 21% based on 28 reviews, with the site's critical consensus stating, "Dull, poorly directed, and badly miscast, Red Sonja is an uninspired conclusion to Schwarzenegger's barbarian trilogy.

He went on to cite the picture as: "Spectacularly silly...While it might amuse juvenile viewers, most of the fun for adults is in deciding who gives the worse performance -- Brigitte Nielsen or Sandahl Bergman.

According to him, "While Conan the Barbarian was sword-and-sorcery, this is grunt-and-groan: the actors grunt, while the audience groans...Amid wooden thespianism, redundant comedy relief, and clunky storytelling, Arnold Schwarzenegger's most impressive feat is managing to stay offscreen for more than half the running time despite being top-billed.

[18] Andrea Wright, writing for the Journal of Gender Studies, has argued that the film represents a problematic representation of women, because the character of Red Sonja is sexualized and relies on a male counterpart.

In 2008, Robert Rodriguez and his production company Troublemaker Studios were working on a version that would have starred Rose McGowan as the title character.

[31] In March 2019, according to a Charlotte Kirk article, Lerner dropped Singer from the project because he was unable to secure a domestic distributor.