10 Recent Movies That Avoided Obvious Mistakes
9. Bringing Russell Crowe Back - Gladiator II
Even accepting that Russell Crowe's Maximus Decimus Meridius of course died at the end of the first Gladiator, many fans questioned whether or not Crowe might somehow appear in the sequel in cameo form, given Hollywood's insatiable infatuation with shoehorned fan service and all.
Ridley Scott certainly isn't above including a dream sequence in which Maximus' now-adult son Lucius (Paul Mescal) encounters his father, but evidently smarter heads prevailed, as Crowe's Maximus is nowhere to be seen.
Despite a late-film moment where it appears that Crowe just might show up as a vision to his son, Scott mercifully resists the urge.
Given that Crowe's physicality has understandably changed a lot over the last quarter-century and the moment would've likely required some garish deepfake de-aging CGI to pull off, it's surely for the best that Crowe stayed out of the sequel entirely.
All the same, many Gladiator fans remain curious about Nick Cave's scrapped original mid-2000s script for Gladiator II, which would've seen Maximus revived and sent on a mission to end Christianity by killing Jesus Christ.