What Happened Next? - 9 Planned Movie Sequels That Were Cancelled
3. Gladiator 2
"Hey Russell, didn't you die in Gladiator 1?"
"Yeah, you sort that out."
That's singer-screenwriter Nick Cave questioning how Russell Crowe could possibly return for a Gladiator sequel, considering his character - Maximus Decimus Meridius - died in the first. And from this brief exchange, the madness of Gladiator 2 was born.
A followup to Gladiator had been in development since the early 2000s. In 2001, IGN reported that it could possibly be a prequel. A year later, reports surfaced that it would be a sequel instead, set 15 years after the first film and with no word of Crowe's involvement. But as time went on and the actor grew more and more interested in returning to the franchise, talks shifted and the million-dollar question became this: how could Maximus feasibly appear in a sequel?
This led to Crowe and Ridley Scott approaching Cave, asking him to solve that problem and deliver them a script. And the result was... bonkers. The screenwriter opened up about his version of Gladiator 2 to Den Of Geek, and it really has to be read to be believed:
"He [Maximus] 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 Gladiator back to kill Christ and his followers."
“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."
How did Crowe react? "Don't like it mate." Cave's time-hopping eternal-warrior concept was unsurprisingly rejected, and Gladiator 2 shelved. But with Scott revealing in 2017 that he knows how to bring Crowe back for a sequel (via EW), perhaps we'll get to see another version one day.