Ridley Scott Knows How to Bring Maximus Back for GLADIATOR 2
Ridley Scott was at SXSW promoting his upcoming Alien: Covenant this weekend, and he revealed he has ideas for a sequel to another of his old properties: Gladiator. There is just one tiny issue: (SPOILER!) Maximus dies at the end of Gladiator. But Scott won’t let that stop him. He told EW:
“I know how to bring him back. 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. Gladiator was 2000, so Russell’s changed a little bit. He’s doing something right now but I’m trying to get him back down here.”
I assume he has some plan that doesn’t involve a zombie outbreak in Ancient Rome. Maybe Maximus sets up a gladiatorial contest in the Fields of Asphodel? Or Elysium, if we're being generous? The only real way I can see this working is if Scott plans to make a prequel, not a sequel. I would be totally down to watch Maximus’s days as a Roman general. But there is also a problem with that: it has been 17 years since the movie came out, and in that time star Russell Crowe has aged about 30 years, and at least some of Gladiator’s appeal was hot young Russell Crowe. Lola VFX would have their work cut out for them.
Or they could go this batshit route: Back when Dreamworks, Scott, and Crowe were initially making sequel plans, they commissioned Nick Cave to write a script for a sequel in which the Roman gods return Maximus to Earth to kill Jesus. Birth Movies Death posted a detailed summary of the script a couple years ago, and you really should read it, because it is really really crazy, and in the end Maximus is cursed to fight in every war in history or something. The movie would end with him in the Pentagon getting ready to lunch nuclear missiles. See, this is why studios don't let directors kill the main characters of tentpole films anymore.
In 2013, Cave told Marc Maron:
“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. It was a stone cold masterpiece. I enjoyed writing it very much because I knew on every level that it was never going to get made. Let’s call it a popcorn dropper.”
Presumably Cave is right, and that script is never ever going to be produced. But a tiny part of me really hopes that when Ridley Scott says, “I know how to bring him back,” he doesn’t mean in flashbacks or in the memories of his surviving son or in a prequel, he means that the Roman gods can return Maximus to Earth to kill Jesus. Because as terrible as it would be (and it would be TERRIBLE), it sounds like the kind of terrible I would love to see.
Via: io9