Gladiator 2: What Really Happened?

3. The Reactions To Cave's Script

Incredibly, Nick Crave's script wasn't made into a film, but that's not to say everyone was totally against it. Ridley Scott, for one, has spoken quite positively about it, saying they tried to make it happen and that it "works very well" as a piece of storytelling, and the Crowe didn't want to let the idea go. There are, however, different reports on Crowe's opinion on the script.

While the actor told Empire that he and Scott did consider it for a while, even calling Cave a "brilliant writer" and acknowledging how difficult to was to find a way of bringing Maximus back from the dead, the Bad Seeds frontman remembered things differently, recalling on Marc Maron's WTF podcast (via Den of Geek) that he told him he "didn't like it mate" to both the story and the ending.

To be fair, though, Cave seems to be remembering a different script entirely, adding that the Gods sent Maximus back to kill Christ, and that he even wanted to call the movie Christ Killer(!). The musician goes on to say it was a "stone cold masterpiece," but that he wrote it because he knew on "every level" it would never get made, referring to it as a "popcorn dropper". Because why else would you write a 103-page script?