It took more than 20 years, but they finally got around to making a sequel to Gladiator, the rock-the-Colosseum phenomenon that conquered the box office and won the Best Picture Oscar at the start of this century. Ridley Scott’s belated return to an Ancient Rome of swords, sandals, and teeming CGI crowds finally arrives in American theaters this weekend, ready to satiate the bloodlust of a multiplex hoi polloi ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday. Whether moviegoers will flock to Gladiator II as bountifully as they did to its beloved predecessor remains to be seen. Twenty-four years is a long time. And Paul Mescal, magnetic actor though he can be, is no Russell Crowe.
However well Gladiator II does, one thing’s for sure: It could have been weirder. Like, a lot weirder. For proof, one need only consider the version they didn’t make — a particular, rejected pitch for a Gladiator sequel that’s become about as legendary, in its unrealized way, as the fallen hero it would have resurrected. Back in the early 2000s, Nick Cave — yes, that Nick Cave, the musician — wrote a draft. His Gladiator II featured no gladiators. It found Maximus returning from the dead (!) on a mission to destroy Christianity (!!). And it ended in the present day, with our ageless hero washing his hands in a Pentagon bathroom.
The script remains a wild what-if of Hollywood history. It’s also not the only Gladiator sequel that died on the vine. Multiple ideas were tossed around in the years following the original’s massive success. One reportedly would have functioned a bit like The Godfather Part II — part sequel and part prequel.
What they all had in common, for a while, was the same vexing dilemma: How do you do Gladiator without Russell Crowe? So much of that movie’s power rests on the commanding Kiwi actor, whose turn as Maximus won him an Academy Award and propelled him to stardom. Casting him in a sequel would require some kind of cheat, some way to get around the ending of Gladiator, when Crowe’s character said his rather final goodbyes and was reunited with his murdered family.
The Gladiator II opening this weekend opts to simply move beyond Maximus, taking the legacy sequel route of handing protagonist duties to his bastard son. But in the 2000s, a Crowe-less Gladiator still seemed inconceivable. It was Crowe, in fact, who supposedly commissioned Cave to write a draft of the sequel — and to figure out how to work his character back into the story. On a 2013 episode of WTF with Marc Maron, Cave recalls asking Crowe how he could be in part two if he died in part one. “Yeah, you sort that out,” he was told.
The Bad Seeds frontman, who then had only one screenplay to his name (he’d eventually write a couple more for Aussie countryman John Hillcoat, including the terrific Outback oater The Proposition), devised a supernatural solution. His script, which can now be easily found and read online, opens with Maximus awakening not in Elysium — the golden-hued afterlife where he’s implied to have landed at the end of Gladiator — but rather in a bleak purgatory where souls huddle together in a vast, squalid refugee camp. A mere 14 pages into the script, Maximus confronts the ailing Roman gods. In order to be reunited with his family, he must return to the land of the living, and stop the rise of a messiah-like figure spreading belief in a single deity.
Not for nothing did Cave subtitle his script Christ Killer. Which isn’t to say that Jesus is actually a character in his version of Gladiator II — at least not the draft you can find online. Nonetheless, Cave did treat the assignment as an excuse to explore the clash between old and new religion, respectively represented by grown versions of the two young boys we met in Gladiator. One of them is Maximus’ slain son, Marius, mysteriously resurrected and now a devout Christian being hunted and persecuted by the Roman army. The other is a similarly older Lucius, the son of Connie Nielsen’s character in Gladiator, who might also be Maximus’ kid, and who has become a cruel, petty tyrant in adulthood. (Lucius playing a central role seems to be the one idea shared by every significant draft of Gladiator II, including the one they filmed.)
It’s no great mystery why this script wasn’t filmed. The Colosseum doesn’t show up until about 70 pages in, when we get a brief naval battle (à la a scene that made it into the finished sequel, though there are alligators instead of sharks in Cave’s take). Again, there are no actual gladiators in his screenplay; Cave doesn’t replicate the almost sports-movie arc of the original, and in fact, reserves most of the swordplay for the climax. While Gladiator strongly hinted at a world beyond our own, it mostly situated itself in historical reality. Cave’s take on Gladiator II goes full myth, shifting the story fully into the realm of surreal fantasy. It would have made for a very strange and different sequel, and the studios don’t really do strange and different.
Reports conflict on who exactly vetoed the draft. Cave, on that same podcast episode, claims that Crowe didn’t like it. But in a recent interview with The New York Times, Scott says it was producer Steven Spielberg who said “nah.” Either way, it’s impossible to imagine this Gladiator II making it to the screen as written. It’s too heady, too bonkers, too low on what made the original such a big hit. A Gladiator sequel without any arena combat? Dream on! And the explicit focus on the slaughter of Christians was probably too risky for Hollywood — at least before The Passion of the Christ, which owes a pretty clear stylistic debt to Gladiator, demonstrated the profitability of such subject matter.
By virtue of its audacity, Cave’s take on Gladiator II has amassed a cult following over the years. (“Make Nick Cave’s Gladiator 2 Script, You Cowards,” crowed /Film last year.) There’s a lot to admire about it. Cave’s dialogue has flair and flavor: “He is an agitator,” says the god Jupiter. “He squeezes the bellow of dissent… a little wind… a mere puff… but with the presage of pandemonium.” And it would be exciting to see someone — like Scott or another maestro of epics — execute the more mythic passages, such as the opening stretch in the sunless limbo. That said, Cave’s peculiar parable is severely lacking in just about everything that made the original a rousing good time. And it ends just as it’s getting interesting, with a montage of Maximus fighting his way across time, a soldier of all wars (an idea later picked up, probably coincidently, by the awful X-Men Origins: Wolverine).
You read Cave’s Gladiator II and you understand why it doesn’t exist beyond the page. Cave himself seems to understand, too, confessing that he wrote it knowing it would probably never actually get made. The version they did make is almost certainly more savvy — a smarter box-office play, much closer in commercial, cornball spirit to Scott’s Y2k hit. All the same, it’s hard not to perversely wish that the stars had someone aligned for Cave’s Gladiator II. The movie’s opening weekend would have made the response to Joker: Folie à Deux look approving. Every multiplex would have become an enraged, unruly Colosseum.
Gladiator II opens in theaters everywhere on Friday, November 22. You can read Nick Cave’s unfilmed, maybe unfilmable draft here.
