20 Things You Didn’t Know About Gladiator
1. An Insane Sequel Was Written
Shortly after Gladiator's release, Scott and Crowe approached acclaimed singer/songwriter Nick Cave with a view to writing a sequel. Years after the fact, Cave's amazing first draft managed to make its way online - and it has to rank as one of the weirdest and most awesome missed opportunities in cinematic history.
Cave believed he'd solved the problem of Maximus’ death:
"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 [Maximus] back to kill Christ and his followers.”
You want more? Oh yes, there's more.
"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... Russian tanks... It was a stone cold masterpiece."
Cave's tongue-in-cheek description aside, people who've actually read the screenplay have genuinely hailed it as a masterpiece of storytelling, if not exactly the movie they want to see as a sequel to Gladiator. Ridley Scott was one of them:
"We tried [to make the movie]. Russell didn't want to let it go, obviously, because it worked very well. When I say "worked very well", I don't refer to success. I mean, as a piece it works very well. Storytelling, [it] works brilliantly. I think [Cave] enjoyed doing it, and I think it was one of those things that he thought, 'Well, maybe there's a sequel where we can adjust the fantasy and bring [Maximus] back from the dead."
Cave, however, was not bothered:
"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.”