Ridley Scott Wants Russell Crowe Back for Gladiator 2
Ridley Scott will not rest until he has tarnished the name of every good film he has ever made. So, of course he wants to make a sequel to Gladiator. In a recent interview with EW, Scott seems more than willing to revisit ancient Rome, but places the ball firmly in Russell Crowe's court, who Scott thinks should return as the main character Maximus (full name: Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next).
Fans of the original film might find that difficult to swallow because, well, (spoilers, but this movie is nearly twenty years old so honestly this warning should've expired long ago) Maximus is unequivocally dead at the end of the film, a fact Scott hasn't forgotten: "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."
The really interesting bit here, though, is that this isn't the first time a sequel to Gladiator has come up, and surprisingly, this isn't even the first time Scott has floated the idea of Maximus returning from the grave. Around 2009, Scott, Crowe, and the studio were jazzed up about a sequel, and they must've had a crazy brainstorming session. Scott came up with the idea of addressing Maximus' death by diving head first into the afterlife. Crowe took that inspirational kernel to his famous musician buddy Nick Cave, who also happens to be a writer. The script Cave delivered has been floating around the internet for quite a while, and honestly, it is certifiably insane (check out this fantastic write up by Scott Wampler over at Birth.Death.Movies.). For those who don't want to read the lengthy linked article, the film would've featured Maximus escaping from the gods in the afterlife to search for his apparently not-dead Roman soldier son, which throws him in the middle of the conflict between the Roman Empire and Christianity, culminating in a time-hopping climax that shows Maximus fighting in nearly every major historical war. Like I said, insane. But I like to think it's the kind of bonkers that was just crazy enough to work, had it not completely spooked the studio. It also might have been the kind of nuts-o nonsense that leads to terrible movies. We'll never really know. Or maybe we will, if this was really the solution to which Scott was alluding.
Thinking about this off-the-wall script actually getting made is fun, but the truth is, this shouldn't qualify as the breaking news some outlets are making it (guilty as charged). No deals have been made, nobody has been hired, and as Scott himself said in the interview, "Russell's changed a bit." Scott was merely answering an interview question, and everyone decided to lose their minds over something he has been talking about for about eight years. As an excuse to bring up that unbelievable Nick Cave script, though, it's pretty irresistable.
