Gladiator Director Reflects on Abandoned Plan to Bring Back Russell Crowe’s Maximus

A key component of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is that Russell Crowe’s Maximus suffers fatal wounds in his attempts to take down Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus, though this finale also meant that Crowe would be unlikely to return for a sequel. Despite this plot point, Scott recently confirmed how he and Crowe had contacted musician Nick Cave about writing a sequel in which Maximus would find a way to return from the beyond to continue his quest for revenge. While Scott confirmed the truth behind these reports, he denied offering insight into other elements of the script, as he felt like other filmmakers could steal those ideas. Gladiator 2 is expected to land in theaters on November 22, 2024.

“Nick Cave wrote the script, but I had the idea. I knew how to bring him back through a portal, back to the real world,” Scott detailed to the ReelBlend podcast. “I’m not going tell you what it is, because somebody will steal it … I talked to Nick every other day for about a month as he was writing it. And so I said, ‘We can bring him back this way.’ And what I want to do is start the film in Styx, on the edge of the ocean, and you see him, this warrior, wandering in armor. Then, it’s Maximus wandering, looking for where he’s going to go next. That’s Scene One.”

With Gladiator being a massive critical and financial success, it seemed like a given that a sequel would be developed, especially if there was a way to revive Crowe’s Maximus. Many involved in the original movie thought a straightforward sequel could work, retroactively claiming Maximus never died, but even Crowe himself was committed to a more ambitious experience.

“It’s kind of amazing. The thing is, at the time, I came up with the idea and I was the one that brought Nick into that process, I was the one that paid him to do a draft,” Crowe confirmed earlier this year to the Happy Sad Confused podcast about the abandoned sequel. “It’s so odd because, at the time when we discussed it, everybody else that was involved with that one wanted to do a straight-ahead thing. ‘No, he gets injured in that thing but they stick him in a cage, put on some frickin’ herbs, and, three days later, they open the cave and out he comes.’”

He continued, “The other side of that was, this other idea I had, was he’s killed too many people to go to Heaven but he’s too good a man to be cast into Hell. So you meet Maximus and it’s like you’re in a refugee camp on the Somalian border. You don’t know where you are, but when you meet him and realize he’s in Limbo, he’s stuck between worlds. The idea that we had, in order to get him back to Earth, it was all just the fireballs and [it was] cool and we could have done it, but these things require a whole bunch of people to be facing in the same direction. I was very, very busy so I didn’t give it probably the time that I should have.”

Stay tuned for updates on Gladiator 2 before it hits theaters on November 22, 2024.

Would you have liked to have seen this sequel? Let us know in the comments!