1.) Reguardless of the actor this Conan will fail with the real Conan fans. If you want the Howard Conan then run for this hills. This is another Hollywood Origin story. Boo.
2.) Red Sonja is a character that Roy Thomas tweaked from REH's fiction to make a sword and sorcery Heroine.
The character was loosely based on Red Sonya of Rogatino in Robert E. Howard's short story "The Shadow of the Vulture" (The Magic Carpet, January 1934), which Roy Thomas rewrote as a Conan story for Marvel Comics Conan the Barbarian #23 (1973). Thomas also somewhat based Red Sonja on another Howard character, Dark Agnes de Chastillon, a sword woman in 16th-century France.[1]
Red Sonja is somewhat different from Robert E. Howard's original Red Sonya. Besides tweaking the spelling of her name, Thomas transformed her from a sword- and pistol-wielding supporting character of the late Renaissance into a sword-wielding heroine of Conan's prehistoric Hyborian Age.
Blah.