Gladiator 2: What Really Happened?

4. The Nick Cave Script

With Scott and Crowe both interested in making a follow-up, and DreamWorks certainly keen on it too given how well the first one performed, the director and actor went to an unlikely source for a script: Nick Cave.

Yes, the Nick Cave who was the frontman for Australian experimental rock band Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. The Nick Cave who once fronted a band known as being "the most violent live band in the world". That Nick Cave. (Although, in the interest of fairness, he had written the critically acclaimed The Proposition, so it does make slightly more sense in context.)

And, well, the script was as wild as his stage performances.

The film opens in the midst of a storm, with two thieves looting the armour and weaponry from Maximus' lifeless body - only for Maximus to suddenly awake. This is not his resurrection, but the afterlife, through which he's guided by Mordecai. He's brought to the remaining Roman Gods, who are a shadow of their former selves, and tasked with bringing down their brother Hephaestus, who has been spreading dissent. If he kills Hephaestus, then he'll be reunited with his wife and son in the golden wheat fields of Elysium.

So it is that Maximus finds and kills Hephaestus, only to be transported back to Rome, his body flesh and blood but his life eternal, with the story resuming some 18-years after death. Lucius is now leading the Romans in the genocide of Christians, and Maximus finds his old friend Juba, with whom he forms a resistance to fight back against the Romans. He transforms the Christians into a true army, resulting in a bloody battle that could well be the end - but there's much more craziness to come.

After the end of the battle, Maximus orders his men to regroup and prepare for another fight. Except that fight doesn't actually come in Ancient Rome. Instead, Maximus is transported to the Crusades in the Holy Land, and then to various other battles, from World War II to Vietnam, travelling through time and fighting in a number of the biggest, bloodiest wars across history. It ends with Maximus in a toilet at the Pentagon, wearing a suit, where he then walks into an office, opens up a laptop, and gets ready to address a number of other men, presumably about the new threats facing the world (this was right in the War on Drugs and War on Terror period, after all), before fading to black.