Russel Crowe once approached Nick Cave to write a sequel for Gladiator, and he did – complete with time travel and a plot to kill Jesus.
A box-office hit, Best Picture winner at the Oscars, and a cultural phenomenon, Gladiator was the biggest movie of the year at the turn of the century. Twenty-years on there has been no sequel, but did you know Nick Cave was approached to write one?
Yes, Nick Cave of Bad Seeds and Grinderman fame was in talks with old mate Russel Crowe to pen a sequel to Gladiator.
When the Gladiator’s producer Douglas Wick sat down to talk to CinemaBlend last month in honour of a 20th anniversary 4k re-release of the film, Wick said there was still talk of a sequel, but described that the challenge is that “everyone has such respect for the movie that any sort of cynical moneymaking endeavour would be repugnant to anyone involved.” However, one attempt at a sequel that Wick failed to mention was Cave’s endeavour; a version of events which actually proceed the events of the original Gladiator.
On a 2013 episode of WTF with Marc Maron, Cave revealed that Crowe had reached out to him to propose he write Gladiator 2. Cave was tasked with coming up with a way to – *spoilers* – bring protagonist Maximus back from the dead – to which he responded by writing the most outlandish script possible.
just thinking about Nick Cave’s Gladiator 2 again pic.twitter.com/DMYXjEeauT
— Sam Diss (@SamDiss) July 1, 2019
According to Cave on the WTF podcast, Maximus begins the story in purgatory before being sent back to earth to kill Jesus Christ and his followers. He then uses his new powers of time travel to participate in every major war from the time of Jesus, up until the Vietnam War.
Cave’s vision never came to fruition, but with the movie’s 20th anniversary sparking new discussion around a Gladiator 2, we can only hope his script winds up being made. If not, maybe we’ll have to start a GoFundMe to make it ourselves.
Someone please make a movie interlacing Nick Cave’s Gladiator II script with the story of that script not getting made.
— Tom Scocca (@tomscocca) May 16, 2016
We NEED the nick cave Gladiator 2
— Kilo 1312 (@OilyWhisper68) January 21, 2019
