The first script for Gladiator 2 turned Russell Crowe into a time-traveling zombie warrior

A zombified Maximus – Russell Crowe’s Roman warrior from Ridley Scott’s 2000 Oscar winner Gladiator – straightens his tie as he looks into a bathroom mirror at the Pentagon in modern-day Washington, DC. He then leaves the room and prepares for his next mission, in an endless cycle of violence that dates back to ancient Rome. Thus ends the infamous script for a Gladiator sequel that will never be made – especially now that the conventional sequel, Gladiator IIactually exists.

A quarter century after Ridley Scott’s sword-and-sandals epic grossed more than $450 million at the box office and won Best Picture (and four other Academy Awards), the saga of Maximus Decimus Meridius has returned to theaters. But while Gladiator II follows Maximus’ son Lucius (Paul Mescal) on a familiar quest to win his freedom, exact revenge and change Rome for the better through the Colosseum. There was a point in the mid-2000s when Scott, Crowe and Australian alternative rocker Nick Cave attempted to take the franchise in a radically different direction.

In one 2013 interview with Marc MaronCave revealed how this all came about. After the success of the original film, Universal Pictures wanted a sequel. But while Scott’s original plan was to tell a new story with new characters in that same world (a logical choice, considering his hero and villain are both dead by the end of the film), Crowe was eager to return to the role that won him his victory. first Oscar, so he asked Cave to help.

This wasn’t as strange a request as it might seem. Yes, Cave is best known as the frontman of the rock band Nick Cave and the Bad Seedsbut he also wrote the 2005 film The proposalan Australian western that deserved mostly positive reviews. Fresh off that success, a career in Hollywood seemed like an achievable goal for Cave.

Regardless of who wrote the script, the real problem, however, was figuring out how to bring Maximus back from the dead. “That’s where it all went wrong,” Cave said to Maron, recalling a blunt conversation that apparently went like this:

Nick Cave: “Hey, Russell, didn’t you die? Gladiator 1?“

Russel Crowe: “Yes, take care of that.”

His screenplay (subtitled Christ murderer) has become legendary. The bizarre but compelling script begins in the afterlife, sends Maximus back to Rome as an undead warrior, and ultimately ends with a centuries-long war montage as Crowe battles his way through the Crusades, World War II, and Vietnam. “I really enjoyed writing it because I knew on every level that it would never get made,” Cave told Maron.

You can read the complete treatment of 103 pages for yourself onlinebut you probably have better things to do. So here’s a summary.

Gladiator 2: Christ Killer opens in the underworld, a desolate afterlife full of human suffering and endless rain. (Cave describes it as a “soggy wilderness.”) Maximus soon meets a guide, Mordecai, who takes him to a crumbling temple where the Roman gods hold court.

Cave imagines the gods as decrepit, little old men who have lost their power due to the rise of Christianity. They send Maximus on a mission to kill the troublesome god Hephaestus, who is rallying support for Christianity. If the assassination mission is successful, they claim they will reunite Maximus with his deceased wife and son. But the heretical deity deceives our hero and sends him back to the world of the living. Maximus is suddenly transported through space and time and arrives in France 17 years after the events Gladiator.

The resurrection of Maximus is one of the script’s most dramatic moments, with Russell Crowe rising from the body of a dying man in the middle of a skirmish between Roman soldiers and Christian rebels. In a 2017 interviewScott explained the logic behind this resurrection, telling a YouTuber that Maximus could travel through “a dying warrior’s portal” to come back to life.

That’s never made clear in the script, but Mordecai does reveal that the gods banished Maximus from the afterlife because he failed in his mission, making him immortal. “You, my friend, have angered the gods,” says Mordecai. “They have assumed that you will never return… to the other world.” In 2023, Crowe provided a more thematic explanation the Happy sad confused podcast: “He killed too many people to go to heaven, but he’s too good a man to go to hell.”

From here, Gladiator 2: Christ Killer plays out as a surprisingly simple and somewhat boring historical epic. Maximus goes to Rome, where his deceased son has been reincarnated as an adult Christian rebel. The version of Gladiator II now in theaters with Lucius, the emperor’s cousin in the original Gladiatoras Maximus’ son, but that doesn’t happen in Cave’s script. In his version, Lucius is the villain: a Roman general determined to eradicate Christianity.

Both versions of the film emphasize civil unrest, but while Cave’s script devotes many scenes to the Christians living in Rome and their struggle for survival, Ridley Scott’s 2024 sequel will be written by Napoleon screenwriter David Scarpa – constantly tells us that the Roman people are unhappy, but never really shows us why. However, Scott and Scarpa’s film gives audiences what they were excited about from the first film: battles in the Colosseum and there are plenty of them, with the first taking place during the opening hour of the film, followed by several more.

By comparison, Cave’s script takes 81 minutes to get to the arena, and that’s just for one short scene. Both screenwriters flood the Colosseum for a… historically accurate naval battlebut neither can resist adding animals that would never have been present. (Scott fills the waters with deadly sharks; Cave chooses ‘100 alligators.’)

Ultimately, the biggest problem with Cave’s script is that it doesn’t make much use of the core concept. Zombie Maximus is a creative idea with endless possibilities, but aside from an early scene where he strolls through a plague-ridden city on his way to Rome, his immortality doesn’t matter much to the plot until the end of the story. (Maximus has always been a killing machine, and making him undead doesn’t change that.)

While Scott’s sequel climaxes in a rousing Lucius speech that stops a war before it can begin and restores peace to Rome, Cave chose to end his script in massive bloodshed. His version of Lucius sends an army into the forest where the surviving Christians are hiding, leading to a violent battle.

As the dust settles, Nick Cave finally reveals his stunning twist. A series of scenes show Maximus endlessly trudging through history, fighting during the Crusades, World War II and Vietnam. Each battle is depicted in a single vignette, creating a montage of warfare somewhat similar to the opening credits of X-Men Origin: Wolverine. (The Vietnam War gets only four words in Cave’s script: “Jungle. Carnage. Choppers. Flamethrowers.”)

The action takes Maximus from ancient Rome to modern-day America. It’s unclear why he ends up at the Pentagon, working for the US military, but the implication is that after Vietnam he was conscripted into some sort of top-secret special operations unit. It ends with that moment of adjustment, as Maximus looks at himself in the Pentagon mirror and then turns to find Mordecai behind him. He greets him with “Ah, Mordecai,” and Mordecai responds, “Yes, Maximus. Until eternity itself has said its prayers.”

Maximus does not respond to this strange joke; he returns to a Pentagon briefing room, where he apologizes to the assembled men for the interruption, sits down with a laptop and tells them, “Where were we?” Role credits.

When Cave presented the script to Crowe, the conversation went as you’d expect (again, via that Marc Maron interview):

Russel Crowe: “I don’t like it, buddy.”

Nick Cave: “What about the ending?”

Russel Crowe: “I don’t like it, buddy.”

And yet, despite the absurdity of Cave’s script, there is a powerful idea at its core. By turning Maximus into a Christian hero (both in Rome and later during the Crusades), the script seems to draw a line between religion and some of the deadliest conflicts in human history. It’s a dark message, especially compared to the more uplifting ending Scott offers Gladiator IIin which Lucius embraces the dream of a Roman republic – the same idea that fueled his non-zombie father. But beneath that dream, Scott’s story still accepts that violence (both inside and outside the Colosseum) is integral to any form of change in the face of imperial power.

But maybe we do Gladiator 2: Christ Killer a little too much credit. After all, even Cave himself has admitted that he had no real intention of adapting his script into a film.

“The last thing I ever wanted to be involved with was Hollywood,” he said Variety in 2006. “It’s a waste of damn time, and I have a lot to do.”