Gladiator II is just around the corner after what feels like an eternity of waiting for it. While this particular iteration of the movie has been in some level of production for a few years, the idea of doing a sequel to the Best Picture-winning Gladiator can be traced back to 2001, less than a year after the film’s debut. The film we’re about to see released in 2024 seems to have more in line with that original draft, but there was a proposed (but bonkers) script by songwriter Nick Cave that was being worked on in 2006 that would’ve taken the sequel in a much different direction. Let’s dive into it.

After the success of Gladiator, DreamWorks naturally wanted to see if it was possible to get a sequel out to bank on the success of the film. With Russell Crowe’s Maximus dead, the idea was to shift the attention to Lucius, whom Paul Mescal is playing in the 2024 Gladiator II. John Logan, who wrote the original Gladiator, was brought on to write this story, which would see Lucius searching for the truth about his father while the Praetorians ruled the Empire and would be a hybrid sequel/prequel. Russell Crowe worked extensively with script development and was attached as a producer on the project, which was said to heavily explore the concept of the afterlife in Roman culture at the time, something that Crowe was pushing for. But this story would enter development hell and no progress or developments would be made on Gladiator II for years.

Then, in 2006, singer/songwriter Nick Cave was hired by Russell Crowe to write a script for a Gladiator sequel, which was written under the working name “Christ Killer“. When Cave asked, “Didn’t you die in Gladiator 1?”, Crowe responded with: “Yeah, you sort that out.” And so, Cave had to find a way to make Maximus central to the plot while pushing the story forward. Bearing in mind that the original 2001 draft had a focus on the afterlife, Cave’s treatment dove deep into this concept in a big way.

In Christ Killer, Maximus wakes up not in the wheat fields he foresaw, but in a pretty miserably rainy plain of existence revealed to be Purgatory. He finds a spirit guide, Mordecai, who escorts him to the Roman Gods who are in need of such a noble warrior, as it so happens. With the rise of Christianity on Earth, the power of the Pagan Roman gods has been waning, so much so that even Hephaestus has converted to Christianity. So the gods make a deal with Maximus: kill Hephaestus and stop the spread and influence of this powerful new religion in exchange for reuniting with his dead family, which Maximus agrees to and wakes up in the body of a dead Christian warrior in Lyon a few decades after the events of the original film. But plot twist, Marius, his son who seemingly died on the cross in the original Gladiator, is in fact, very much alive and involved in Christianity now. Lucius also grows up to become the film’s villainous new emperor, a stark contrast to the protagonist of the canon sequel. Maximus hits the road with Juba (Djimon Houson) and ends up in Rome, where they secret train an army of anti-Christ soldiers and where the games are about to showcase a flooded Colosseum to recreate naval battles; something we will see in the upcoming Gladiator II.

The plot involves battles, deceptions and family betrayal. Maximus, of course, ends up siding on the side of the Christians and kills Emperor Lucius in the climactic battle, with the help of a regretful Marius. He then lives out eternity as an immortal warrior, which would’ve seen Maximus fighting everywhere from the Crusades to the Second War World, to the Vietnam War, before the film closes on him being a Pentagon agent in the modern age in a twenty-minute sequence at the end of the film, not unlike the opening to X-Men Origins: Wolverine, I’d imagine.

So why didn’t this movie happen? In the end, despite wanting to come back as Maximus, Russell Crowe simply did not like Cave’s script. It was very “out there” and far removed tonally and conceptually from the original Gladiator film that it may as well have been a completely different story, not one bound by the events of the original film. Crowe’s feedback was simple: “don’t like it, mate”. Honestly, as a sequel to Gladiator, I get it, but as a standalone movie, I think it’s actually a really neat idea and wouldn’t mind seeing it come to life without the baggage of the Gladiator IP. Crowe may not be involved with the real Gladiator II now, but stay tuned for our review of that!

If you want to read Nick Cave’s script, it is available to read online.

Sources:

BBC

World of Reel