Russell Crowe versus Jesus Christ: the demented story of Nick Cave’s rejected Gladiator 2 script

The original Gladiator may have ended with the deaths of everyone important, but that isn’t stopping director Ridley Scott from exhuming the swords-and-sandals epic for a new sequel. After years of teasing, a Gladiator 2 is reportedly officially in development, with Scott returning to the director’s chair and David Scarpa, screenwriter on Scott's forthcoming Napoleon biopic, handling the script. Normal People and Aftersun’s Paul Mescal is set to star after seeing off rivals, including Timothée Chalamet.

“I’m already having [the next] Gladiator written now,” Scott told Empire magazine in October 2022. “So when I’ve done Napoleon, Gladiator will be ready to go.”

Mescal will play Lucius, the son of Maximus’s ex Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), and nephew of Joaquin Phoenix’s villainous Commodus. The role was played by a 13-year-old Spencer Treat Clark in the original film, so the 26-year-old Mescal will play an older version of the character.

No further details of the plot have been released – but you can bet it’s likely to be a more grounded affair than the sequel sketched out by Nick Cave, the shock individual previously recruited to bring Russell Crowe back to the franchise. The punk-rock musican and novelist’s version, which leaked online in 2009, was a wacky oddity that truly needs to be read to be believed, with Cave exploring time travel, crocodile armies and the Pentagon.

Yet its outlandishness is somewhat excused when you consider how the original ended. After all, Crowe’s iconic Maximus Decimus Meridius was last seen slain in a colosseum and riding off into the afterlife with his dead wife and son. Hardly propitious ground for a stirring new tale.

In fact, Crowe’s involvement in a potential sequel had been a sticking point for Scott throughout the more than two decades since Gladiator’s release, leading to Cave’s unusual hiring. While DreamWorks Pictures, the original film’s financier, were eager for Crowe to return in some capacity, even pursuing the idea of a prequel in order to bring him back, Scott had other plans. He recruited original Gladiator screenwriter John Logan to draft a Crowe-less sequel, believed to also revolve around Commodus’s nephew, set 30 years in the future. It's probable some version of this idea will now appear in the Mescal sequel. In 2003, he even said it likely wouldn’t even be called Gladiator.

“I wouldn’t touch gladiators again,” Scott said. “I mean, I wouldn’t touch the gladiatorial side again, we have to go to the next step,” adding that a sequel would be about “politics and praetorians. The parts that are interesting, which always lead to conflict.”

Crowe, it is claimed, wasn’t happy about the move. Eager to return to the character, he turned to his old friend Nick Cave, having read his script for the Australian western The Proposition, a well-received thriller and the second of three film projects Cave has written – his most recent being the 2012 Tom Hardy vehicle Lawless. As Cave recalled on the Marc Maron podcast in 2013, he quickly recognised there may be a problem.

“He rang me up and asked if I wanted to write Gladiator 2… which for someone who had only written one film script was quite an ask”, he recalled. “I did [it] – it didn’t sit well, I don’t think… it all went wrong. I’m like, ‘Hey Russell, didn’t you die in Gladiator 1?’ And he’s all, ‘Yeah, you sort that out.’”

As Cave told it, his outline was thus: “[Maximus] goes to purgatory and is sent down [to earth] 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, and so they send Gladiator back to kill Christ and all his followers.”

He continued: “I wanted to call it Christ Killer, and in the end you find out that the main guy was his son, and he’s tricked by the Gods and all of this stuff, so it ends with him becoming this eternal warrior, and it ends with this 20 minute war sequence that follows all the wars of history, right up to Vietnam. It was wild. It was a stone cold masterpiece.”

Cave’s script was leaked online in 2009, but he may have slightly undersold the madness of his concept. The script saw Maximus floating in the afterlife following the events of the first film, saddened to discover that the fairytale vision he glimpsed at the end of his life wasn’t in fact real – rather the true afterlife is a rain-soaked hellscape. Visited by a spirit guide named Mordecai, Maximus is brought to an ancient ruin housing seven dying Gods, who promise him a proper reunion with his wife and child if he kills Hephaestus, a less decrepid deity who is preaching the word of a rival God on earth.

Magically transported back to Rome, Maximus reunites with his old friend Juba (played by Djimon Hounsou in the original film) and discovers that he has been betrayed by the Gods: his deceased son Marius is in fact alive, having been resurrected and adopted by a Christian family.

Reuniting with Marius, Maximus is encouraged to reject the will of the Gods and wage battle against Commodus’s nephew Lucius, now evil and masterminding a slaughter of Rome’s Christians. A war commences, with one epic colosseum battle featuring a great flood and hundreds of alligators chomping at the heels of Maximus and his army.

Oh, and also Maximus has been granted eternal life, which builds to that wacky closer Cave mentioned. Cursed by the Gods for betraying them and plunging Rome into further bloodshed, Maximus is damned to an eternity of war, the script suggesting that his decision making is the cause of every act of violence that has plagued the world in the centuries since. We watch as a 20-minute flash-forward unspools, depicting Maximus fighting in World War Two and Vietnam, and later winding up in the Pentagon, where he and his fellow politicians plot destruction in a modern war room full of laptops and surveillance cameras. Plus, there’s a sequence where the emperor makes a gag about his pet giraffe being struck by lightning. Get all of that?

According to Cave, Crowe wasn’t particularly enamoured with his draft. “Don’t like it, mate,” he reportedly told him. “‘What about the end? ‘Don’t like it, mate’.”

But Cave was unperturbed. “I enjoyed writing it very much because I knew on every level that it was never going to get made,” he said. “Let’s call it a popcorn dropper.”

Speaking in 2009, Scott said that Crowe wanted to at least pursue Cave’s ideas. “Russell didn’t want to let it go, obviously, because it worked very well,” Scott said. “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.’”

Prodded further while promoting Alien: Covenant in 2017, Scott said: “It was a good idea – [but] it’s on the shelf somewhere at DreamWorks,” and also poured water on a return for Crowe, adding: “Russell’s getting on a bit now.” Earlier that year, however, he had a different stance, telling an audience at the South by Southwest Festival that he knew how to bring back his character.

“I was having this talk with the studio –‘But he’s dead.’ But there is a way of bringing him back. Whether it will happen I don’t know.”

With news that Gladiator 2 is back on track, Scott appears to have made up his mind. Of course, the director has long demonstrated an interest in mythological mumbo-jumboing, with Prometheus's overstuffed backstory. But since we’ve already glimpsed Cave’s vision of a possible sequel, stocked as it was with magical portals, zombies and jokes about electrocuted giraffes, it’s difficult to imagine Scott and Scarpa coming up with anything as entertaining.