Schwarzenegger ready for a comeback

Arnold Schwarzenegger said he would be back.

At 63, after his seven-year Sacramento adventure, the former California governor now yearns for his old Hollywood firepower, the Los Angeles Times reports.

"I can step very comfortably into the entertainment world and do an action movie with the same violence that I've always done," Schwarzenegger said in an interview. "I can have the same amount of heads coming off -- and any other body parts -- and as far as that goes, I don't blink."

"The calls are coming in," he said and while he wouldn't comment specifically, his team hints that first leading-man work since 2003 would be in Korean director Kim Ji-woon's English-language debut "The Last Stand" (about a small-town lawman hunting down a Mexican drug kingpin) or perhaps Antoine Fuqua's "The Tomb" (about a prison designer who is locked up inside one his own high-tech designs).

Schwarzenegger started the week in France at a key television-industry conference in Cannes, announcing his first post-politics project, an animated series for children featuring Schwarzenegger's voice and cartoon likeness. It's a superhero show called "The Governator," a collaboration with Stan Lee, the 88-year-old co-creator of Spider-Man.

Schwarzenegger's last hit was "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," which pulled in $433 million in 2003, but leading up to that was a string of duds that included "Collateral Damage" and "End of Days."

Still, last summer's "The Expendables," directed and starring Sylvester Stallone, made $274 million in worldwide box office with its old-school commando fantasy and aging action-hero cast, including a Schwarzenegger cameo.

"The whole industry has not come up with a new line of action heroes so [people say] let's go see the mature ones -- that's what I call them, the mature ones -- because there's nothing new around," Schwarzenegger said. "That's good news for me."