Gladiator 2, the lost script: Nick Cave's demented plan to bring Russell Crowe back from the dead
While everyone mostly died at the end of Russell Crowe's swords-and-sandals epic Gladiator back in 2000, that isn't stopping director Ridley Scott from putting together a sequel. One that will reportedly feature a presumably zombified Maximus Decimus Meridius.
"I know how to bring him back," Scott told an audience at the SXSW Festival over the weekend. "I was having this talk with the studio—'But he's dead.' But there is a way of bringing him back. Whether it will happen I don't know."
While the sequel news comes as something of a surprise, a Gladiator follow-up has been in the works since the mid-Noughties, with musician Nick Cave responsible for an early script for Gladiator 2 that slightly defies belief. Featuring time travel, crocodile armies and the supernatural, and reportedly to be titled Christ Killer, the script was leaked online in 2009, puzzling readers at the time.
Cave's proposed sequel would have seen Maximus floating in the afterlife, where he is offered the chance to reunite with his deceased wife and son in return for murdering Christians on Earth. But it quickly becomes apparent that Maximus has been betrayed by the Gods, his son in fact alive and deeply religious, convincing Maximus to betray the Gods and wage war against them instead.
At the same time, Maximus has been granted eternal life, and the script ultimately dovetails into scenes depicting Maximus fighting in World War Two, Vietnam, and later winding up in the Pentagon, where he and fellow politicians plot destruction in a modern war room full of laptops and surveillance cameras. It's... a choice.
Cave, who has also scripted critically acclaimed films including The Proposition and Lawless, was personally commissioned to write a Gladiator sequel by Russell Crowe. When Cave asked him how he'd work around the fact that the main character was killed off at the end of the first film, Crowe reportedly told him: "Yeah, you sort that out."
"It was a stone-cold masterpiece," Cave deadpanned on Marc Maron's WTF Podcast in 2013. Asked about Crowe's response on first reading it, Cave recalled the actor saying: "Don't like it, mate."
Scott elaborated further on Cave's draft to UGO (via The Guardian), revealing "We tried to work with it. Russell didn't want to let it go, obviously, because it worked very well. When I say 'worked very well', I don't refer to success. I mean, as a piece it works very well. [As a piece of] storytelling, [it] works brilliantly."
While Scott keeps his cards to his chest regarding Maximus's resurrection in the proposed sequel, Nick Cave's original script can be read below:
Gladiator 2 by Nick Cave by quinntessential on Scribd
