10 Insane Movie Sequels Actors Actually Wanted To Make

Last year it was announced that Ridley Scott has plans to go ahead with a sequel to Gladiator focusing on the now-adult Lucius. If original star Russell Crowe had his way, though, we would have seen a far crazier second instalment.

Goth rock legend Nick Cave revealed that Crowe approached him personally to ask him to write a sequel, even though Cave's only screenwriting credit at the time was as one of five credited writers on 1988's Ghosts... Of The Civil Dead. "Hey, Russell, didn't you die in Gladiator?" Cave said he had asked. "Yeah, you sort that out," was apparently Crowe's response.

Cave "sorted it out" in his own idionsyncratically bizarre way. His sequel script begins with Crowe's Maximus in a bleak afterlife where he is confronted by the old, decaying Roman gods who want him to deal with the threat of the rise of a more popular, powerful new god.

Maximus then gets brought back to life and thrown into the conflict between early Christians and Romans, following which a now essentially immortal Maximus continues to fight his way through every other historical conflict from the Crusades to the Vietnam War. It was, apparently, a comment on the endless cycle of violence perpetuated by Maximus never choosing non-violent resistance.

Although Cave's script involved a massive mock-naval battle in a flooded Colosseum, at no point did the resurrected Maximus ever do any actual Gladiator-ing. Even if it has no immortal endless wars and weird theology, at least the new proposed Gladiator 2 might give us that.

But, what about you, are you on the side of Crowe and his fellow stars desperate to see these bonkers sequel pitches for real? Or would you, like the studios, prefer a Gladiator sequel that bears some actual resemblance to its predecessors? Tell us in the comments