Gladiator 2 started out as a time-traveling zombie movie – read the script

A zombified Maximus – Russell Crowe's Roman warrior from Ridley Scott's 2000 Oscar winner gladiator – adjusts his tie as he looks into a bathroom mirror at the Pentagon in present-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. This ends the infamous script for a gladiator Successor that will never be made – especially now that the comparatively conventional sequel, Gladiator IIactually exists.

A quarter century after Ridley Scott's sword-and-sandal epic grossed more than $450 million at the box office and won Best Picture (and four other Oscars), the saga of Maximus Decimus Meridius has returned to theaters. But while Gladiator II follows Maximus' son Lucius (Paul Mescal) on a familiar quest for his freedom, revenge and changing Rome for the better via the Colosseum. There was a moment in the mid-2000s when Scott, Crowe and Australian rocker Nick Cave tried 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 the same world (a logical choice considering both his hero and villain are dead at the end of the film), Crowe was desperate for the role He got his first Oscar, so he asked Cave for help.

This wasn't as strange a request as it seems. 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 suggestionan Australian Western that deserves it mostly positive reviews. Immediately after this success, a Hollywood career seemed like an achievable goal for Cave.

Regardless of who wrote the script, the real problem was figuring out how to bring Maximus back from the dead. “That’s where everything 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?”

Russell Crowe: “Yeah, you sort that out.”

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

You can read this Download the entire 103-page treatment onlinebut you probably have better things to do. So here is a summary.

Gladiator 2: Christ Killer begins in the Underworld, a bleak afterlife filled with human suffering and endless rain. (Cave describes it as a “sodden 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, petty old men who have lost their power with the rise of Christianity. They send Maximus on a mission to kill a troublesome god, Hephaestus, who is gathering support for Christianity. If the assassination mission is successful, they claim that they will reunite Maximus with his dead wife and son. But the heretical deity betrays 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 of gladiator.

Maximus's resurrection is one of the most dramatic moments in the script: Russell Crowe rises from the body of a dying man in the middle of a battle 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.

This is never made clear in the script, but Mordecai reveals that the gods banished Maximus from the afterlife for failing to complete his mission and made him immortal. “You, my friend, have angered the gods,” says Mordecai. “They assume that you never return… to the other world.” In 2023, Crowe offered 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 straightforward and somewhat boring historical epic. Maximus travels to Rome, where his dead son has been reincarnated as an adult Christian rebel. The version of Gladiator II Now in cinemas: Lucius, the emperor's nephew in the original gladiatoras the son of Maximus, but that doesn't appear in Cave's script. In his version, Lucius is the villain – a Roman general determined to wipe out Christianity.

Both versions of the film focus on riots, but while Cave's script devotes many scenes to the Christians living in Rome and their struggle for survival, Ridley Scott's 2024 sequel – 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 viewers what they were excited about in the first film: Colosseum battles and lots of them, with the first taking place within the film's opening hour, 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 one historically accurate sea battlebut no one can resist the addition of animals that would never have existed. (Scott fills the waters with deadly sharks; Cave opts for “100 alligators.”)

Ultimately, the biggest problem with Cave's script is that it makes little use of its core concept. Zombie Maximus is a creative idea with endless possibilities, but aside from an early scene where he strolls through a plague-stricken city on his way to Rome, his immortality doesn't play much of a role in 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 culminates in a rousing speech from Lucius that ends a war before it can begin and restores peace to Rome, Cave chose to end his script with mass bloodshed. His version of Lucius sends an army into the forest where the surviving Christians are hiding, leading to a fierce battle.

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

The plot takes Maximus from ancient Rome to modern America. It's unclear why he ends up in the Pentagon working for the US military, but the conclusion is that he was drafted into some sort of top-secret special forces unit after Vietnam. It ends with that tie-adjusting moment as Maximus looks at himself in the Pentagon mirror – then he turns around and finds Mordecai behind him. He greets him with “Ah, Mordecai,” and Mordecai replies, “Yes, Maximus. Until eternity itself has said its prayers.”

Maximus doesn't react to this strange taunt – 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 now?” Credits roll.

When Cave presented the script to Crowe, the conversation went as expected (again about the interview with Marc Maron):

Russell Crowe: “I don’t like that, buddy.”

Nick Cave: “What about the ending?”

Russell Crowe: “I don’t like that, 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 in 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 encouraging ending Scott offers Gladiator IIin which Lucius embraces the dream of a Roman Republic – the same idea that fueled his non-zombie father. But behind this dream, Scott's story still accepts that violence (both in the Colosseum and outside) is an essential part of any kind of change in the face of imperial power.

Then again, maybe we give 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 deal with is Hollywood,” he said diversity in 2006. “It’s a damn waste of time and I’m busy.”