Nick Cave Discusses Canned ‘Gladiator 2’ Script

Nick Cave has been talking about his Gladiator 2 script that never made it into production.

Cave was on Mark Maron’s WTF podcast, where he discussed the ideas and plot for his screenplay, admitting that it never had a chance of being made.

Cave recanted, “(Crowe) rang me up and asked if I wanted to write Gladiator 2. For someone who had only written one film script, it was quite an ask. ‘Hey Russell, didn’t you die in Gladiator 1?’ ‘Yeah, you sort that out.’ So, he 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 continued: “I wanted to call it Christ Killer and in the end you find out 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.

The musician then concluded, “It was a stone cold masterpiece. I enjoyed writing it very much because I knew on every level that it was never going to get made. Let’s call it a popcorn dropper.”

Previously, Ridley Scott, who directed the original Gladiator, discussed the possibility of a sequel, remarking, “We tried [to go with Cave’s script]. Russell didn’t want to let it go, obviously, because it worked very well. When I say ‘worked very well’, I don’t refer to success. I mean, as a piece it works very well. Storytelling, it works brilliantly.

Scott added, “I think he enjoyed doing it, and I think it was one of those things that he thought, ‘Well, maybe there’s a sequel where we can adjust the fantasy and bring [Maximus] back from the dead.”

Would you like to have seen Nick Cave’s Gladiator 2 script make it to the big screen?