The Gladiator II That Never Was: Nick Cave’s Dreamy, Downbeat Original Vision of a Sequel

Gladiator II finally hit screens this past weekend, a full 24 years since the first one took the world by storm and won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. With such enormous success, it’s not surprising that rumors of a Gladiator II started coming out of Hollywood as early as 2001. But for those familiar with the first Gladiator, it’s no surprise that trying to make a sequel that continued the story of Maximus would run into some development problems.

By the end of Gladiator, both the protagonist and antagonist of the story are dead. Maximus defeats the emperor Commodus in a swordfight in the arena, but succumbs to a stab wound Commodus inflicted prior to battle. Most supporting characters are still alive - there’s Djimon Honsou’s gladiator friend Juba, Connie Nielsen’s lost love Lucilla, her young boy Lucius, and the forward-thinking Senator Gracchus. But making a sequel without the two Oscar-nominated (and in one case, Oscar-winning) leads of your film would test any faithful audience’s patience. Ridley Scott and certain screenwriters thought they should move on to tell the story of young Lucius, while Russell Crowe and the film’s producers wanted to bring back Maximus in a major, far more surreal way: They wanted him back from the dead.

To create a draft for a sequel that follows Maximus into the afterlife, Crowe brought on the Australian post-punk/goth-rock legend Nick Cave, who had recently received his first screenwriting credit for John Hillcoat’s Ghosts…of the Civil Dead and would go on to write the Australian indie hit The Proposition in 2005. Although the version currently circulating online is titled Gladiator 2, there are rumors that Cave wanted the film to be titled Christ Killer. And if you think that’s a crazy thing to title a sequel to a Best Picture-winning blockbuster smash, just wait until you hear what it’s about.

Nick Cave’s sequel script for Gladiator 2 opens with Maximus waking up in the afterlife, some unholy landscape where souls are trapped in a never-ending purgatory. Even though the first film has visions of Maximus meeting his wife and son in Elysium (the Roman equivalent of Heaven), this script reveals Maximus to be stuck in this oblivion indefinitely instead, kept company by a depressive ghost named Mordecai. Unwilling to listen to Mordecai’s protests that any action he takes will be useless, Maximus decides to track down the Roman gods and demand to be reunited with his family.

The Roman gods have lost their power due to the uprising of Christianity in ancient Rome, but after a long debate, they reveal that Maximus’s son survived the Roman attack in the first film (despite the fact that Maximus saw his crucified body) and will send Maximus back down to Earth if he will help stop this Christian uprising. Unfortunately, Maximus’s son Marius was adopted by a kindly Christian schoolteacher who is leading the fight against Roman tradition. Back on Earth, Maximus sees the Christians slaughtered as they refuse to fight back against the Roman army and, knowing his son is part of them, agrees to help them fight against Rome. This angers an adult Lucius, who has a vendetta against Christians ever since his mother, Lucilla, turned Christian in adulthood and was stoned to death by Romans. Lucius leads the vicious charge against the Christians and, unlike the first film where the climactic battle became a 1-on-1 in the Colosseum, the final battle in this has the Roman army attacking a newly-formed army of Christians led by Maximus.

Much like Joker: Folie À Deux earlier this year, Gladiator 2: Christ Killer would have left audiences baffled and stunned had it been produced and released in the mid-2000s. There’s no way to tell how many drafts of the film Cave wrote before the project was scrapped and sent back to Development Hell, but even copious rewrites could hardly change the fact that, at its core, the story is wildly different from what audiences loved about the first Gladiator. The only extended scene that takes place in the Colosseum isn’t even a swordfight, but a mock battle at sea after the Colosseum is flooded with water (something Ridley Scott and team borrowed for the newest Gladiator 2).

Perhaps the biggest surprise of all, though, is the film’s defiantly downbeat finale. The first Gladiator, while emotional in the death of Maximus, ends triumphantly in the hopes that there will be a new Rome taking the place of the old system, one hopefully more based around Marcus Aurelius’s vision. After the climactic battle at the end of Cave’s Gladiator 2, Marius slays Lucius and all the Christians (as well as Maximus and Juba) look around the corpse-strewn battlefield in horror. They won the battle, the antagonist was defeated, and yet all of them feel like they betrayed their ideals. All of them, except Maximus, who knows that the only way to survive on Earth is to kill or be killed. Unfortunately, Maximus has failed the Roman gods in his mission, so he is no longer welcome in the afterlife.

What happens next is Cave’s biggest creative gamble of the whole script. The film ends with a montage - intercut with a symbolic stag dying on the Christians’ battlefield - of an immortal Maximus leading war after war through the millennia. First, we see him in the Crusades, then in an 18th-century battle. We see Maximus in WWII and in Vietnam surrounded by helicopters and missiles. And finally, we see Maximus in a suit and tie in the war room of the Pentagon - the whole time accompanied by his ghost friend Mordecai.

Even if audiences were able to get on board with the magical realism of the finale, it still would be one of the most nihilistic finales of a major blockbuster ever produced, leaving the hero character beloved by millions cursed to lead wars through all eternity, never to reunite with his wife and son in Elysium as the first film left him. It’s a potent anti-war statement and the invention of a true creative, but in the risk-averse studio model of the 21st century, it would have been a shocking decision if Paramount and Dreamworks moved forward with Cave’s script.
The full screenplay is available to read online, though, and while the Gladiator II that eventually reached the screen doesn’t bear any resemblance to Cave’s demented vision, it’s refreshing to read something so audacious and unwilling to adjust itself to audience expectations. There’s no telling what audiences would have thought of the film if it had reached the screen like this, but there’s enough power and vision in Cave’s work to make one wonder what could have been.