It’s been dubbed “The Strangest Sequel Never Made.” Before Ridley Scott set his template for “Gladiator II,” he had a whole other story in mind, one involving Russell Crowe’s Maximus coming back from the dead.
"I know how to bring him back," Scott had told ME Movies in 2017. "I was having this talk with the studio — Whether it will happen I don’t know. Gladiator was 2000, so Russell’s changed a little bit. He’s doing something right now but I’m trying to get him back down here."
Scott had hired musician Nick Cave to write the script, one which would have had Maximus using the "portal of a dying warrior" to come back from the dead. Cave’s script was written in and around 2006 and sat on the DreamWorks shelf for close to 10 years.
Crowe was also onboard to return for the sequel, in fact he was the one who contacted Cave to write the script. The singer detailed his script, titled “Christ Killer,” on a recent WTF podcast episode:
“(Crowe) rang me up and asked if I wanted to write ‘Gladiator 2,” he said. “For someone who had only written one film script, it was quite an ask. ‘Hey Russell, didn’t you die in ‘Gladiator 1′?’ ‘Yeah, you sort that out.’ So, he goes down to purgatory and is sent down by the gods, who are dying in heaven because there’s this one god, there’s this Christ character, down on Earth who is gaining popularity and so the many gods are dying so they send Gladiator back to kill Christ and his followers.”
“I wanted to call it ‘Christ Killer’ and in the end you find out that the main guy was his son, so he has to kill his son and he was tricked by the gods. He becomes this eternal warrior, and it ends with this 20-minute war scene which follows all the wars in history, right up to Vietnam and all that sort of stuff and it was wild. It was a stone cold masterpiece. I enjoyed writing it very much because I knew on every level that it was never going to get made. Let’s call it a popcorn dropper.”
That’s right, In Nick Cave’s hands, “Gladiator II” would have involved a Christ-like man-god who “goes down to purgatory and is sent back by the gods”. According to Cave, the project came to halt after Crowe read the script, he reacted with a simple, “Don’t like it, mate.” If you’re more curious about “Gladiator II: Christ Killer,” it has been made available to read online.
Even if the script had been greenlit this decade, Crowe would have needed to embark on a major physical transformation as he is currently, most definitely, not in the kind of shape he was 25 years ago.
