Here’s your hot take for Monday: Ridley Scott has gone from being a filmmaker to a movie manufacturer, pumping out trusted, branded entertainment. He’s recently said that the “Alien” franchise could essentially go on forever, he’s producing the upcoming sequel to “Blade Runner,” and he’s still got his eye on the much discussed followup to “Gladiator.”
“I know how to bring him back,” the director said at SXSW (via EW). “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 [Crowe]’s changed a little bit. He’s doing something right now but I’m trying to get him back down here.”
Bringing back the deceased Maximus isn’t as zany as you think, and has been percolating for awhile. Way back in the day, Nick Cave was asked to try coming up with a script for the sequel. And needless to say, it was kinda out there.
“[Maximus] goes down to purgatory and is sent down by the gods, who are dying in heaven because there’s this one god, there’s this Christ character, down on Earth who is gaining popularity and so the many gods are dying so they send Gladiator back to kill Christ and his followers,” Cave said in 2013.
“[It would be revealed] that the main guy was his son so he has to kill his son and he was tricked by the gods. 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,” he added. Damn.
The proposed movie was called “Christ Killer” and it’s probably not a big surprise it didn’t get made. Whether or not this is the concept Scott is still going with remains to seen, but if a “Blade Runner” sequel can happen 35 years after the original, a followup to “Gladiator” doesn’t seem so impossible.
