Gladiator’s Russell Crowe Reflects on Abandoned Nick Cave “Christ Killer” Sequel With Immortal Maximus

More than 20 years after director Ridley Scott’s Gladiator scored an Oscar for Best Picture, a sequel to the epic finally seems to be moving forward, but star Russell Crowe still has a soft spot for an abandoned concept for a follow-up that would have allowed him to return as Maximus. Years ago, Crowe asked Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave to write a script for a sequel, despite Maximus being killed at the end of the film. Crowe had the idea that a sequel would open with Maximus in Limbo and being offered the chance to enter Elysium, so long as he killed the targets of gods, which would have included a Christ-like figure. The script, which was dubbed “Gladiator 2: Christ Killer,” was scrapped and the new sequel will follow Lucius, son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen). 

When discussing the script from Cave with Happy Sad Confused, Crowe explained, “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. 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.”

Even though this more fantastical exploration of the character never moved forward, Crowe noted an interesting similarity with the release of 2010’s Clash of the Titans.

“It’s odd because a couple of years later, after the same people were refusing that it was a cool idea, they remade that old film from the ’50s with Sam Worthington, which is a similar idea where all the gods come alive or whatever,” the actor pointed out.

Gladiator 2 currently has a November 22, 2024 release date.

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