The greatest movies never made: Nick Cave’s ‘Gladiator’ sequel
Ridley Scott’s Gladiator ignited the resurgence of the historical epic at the turn of the millennium after racing to huge box office success and major awards season glory. But for a long time, it looked as though the long-held rumours of a sequel would never come to fruition.
In the majority of cases, Hollywood would be falling over itself to follow up a $465million-grossing hit that won five Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Actor’. But for more than 20 years, the project lingered in development hell before being dusted off and revived.
The still-untitled sequel stands every chance of living up to its predecessor based on the talent involved, with Paul Mescal leading the cast as an older version of Spencer Treat Clark’s Lucius Verus, with support coming from Denzel Washington, Pedro Pascal, and Joseph Quinn, while Connie Nielsen and Derek Jacobi return from the original as Lucilla and Senator Gracchus.
Still, the version pitched by Nick Cave, the man famed for his role as one of Australia’s most prominent rock and rollers was so unhinged, so fantastical, and so utterly preposterous that it would have been glorious to witness. The sequel would have seen Russell Crowe reprising his Oscar-winning part as Maximus Decimus Meridius in a time-travel fantasy epic that wove its way through the course of history to see the eternal warrior becoming embroiled in history’s most fated conflicts.
Basically, Cave’s story was the opening credits of X-Men Origins: Wolverine as a feature film, and while Hugh Jackman’s solo superhero movie was largely terrible, that sequence stands out as its undoubted highlight. Shot through the lens of Crowe and Gladiator, but with an R-rating and the potential to instigate plenty of controversy, the idea of such a movie is a tantalising prospect.
The draft was even written under the working title of Christ Killer, which offers some indication of just batshit crazy things were going to be. In Cave’s mind, the man who dreamed up the horror of The Birthday Party, Maximus would have become trapped in purgatory following his death, with the ancient Roman gods resurrecting him as an immortal and eternal warrior conscripted to do their bidding.
At various points, he’d be sent back to the living world and tasked to halt the rise of Christianity by murdering Jesus Christ and decimating his disciples in an effort to ensure the balance of power didn’t slip from pagan deities. From there, Maximus would have found himself fighting in the Crusades, World War II, and the Vietnam War, with the ending revealing that he’d been holding down a job at the Pentagon.
The overarching theme was that Maximus had doomed humanity to an endless cycle of bloodshed by choosing violence over pacifism, but according to Cave, when he informed Crowe of his idea, the response was a fairly straightforward one: “Don’t like it, mate”.
The musician and filmmaker admitted that he “knew on every level that it was never going to get made,” which is a real shame. Suppose the current iteration of Gladiator 2 fails to live up to expectations. In that case, everybody’s going to end up wishing Cave’s had gotten the green light instead, which it should have from the very beginning based solely on how uniquely demented it would have been.
