You are wrong about Conan's physical attributes not being important. To REH they were incredibly important so that he described them over and over in detail.
Important or not, get too hung up on the physical characteristics of any character and you'll probably end up never making a decent movie. If you insist on a dead ringer for the character you're limiting your options massively because you also need that dead ringer to:
1) Be able to act well.
2) Come across well as that character in every other important way besides just physical appearance (being a good actor rarely if ever means you can play
any character convincingly.)
3) Want to play the part.
4) Be available to play the part.
5) Be affordable within the movie's budget
...Just to mention the
most obvious requirements. For many movies filling these requirements is hard enough. Wait for an exact physical match as well and you could be waiting until hell freezes over.
Ian Fleming also described Bond in exacting detail and being reasonably competent at drawing himself, even drew his own sketch of what he thought the character should look like... Despite looking nothing like that image, Daniel Craig still owned it and made two great Bond movies to date. Nobody who writes these two movies off because of his appearance is doing themselves any favours. They're just missing out. But hey, if that's really what they want... if they'd actually rather miss out than enjoy some good movies, who am I to argue?
Having said that, Momoa may suck as Conan - but if he does it'll be for more fundamental reasons than just not looking quite right.
Okay we've already been slagged off for not talking about Dredd so some people might be asking how is this relevant to Dredd? Well given the pic of the new uniform we've just seen, it's very relevant. Since we never see Dredd's face, arguably the uniform IS his appearance - and even without the face few characters have an appearance as distinctive as Dredd's. Like any comic book character he's physically described far more often than any character in prose - every single panel in which he appears is effectively a physical description of him. I just hope there are not too many people who will ruin their own enjoyment of the film by getting too hung up on what they think the character should look like.
