Each year, a movie will come along that is able to compete with the best films of any genre and stake its claim as one of the top movies of the year. Franchise films in the MCU, DC, and Star Wars are usually found at the top of the box office, but the movies that find a more unique spot in history all had something about them that helped them stand out from the pack.
Back in 2000, Russell Crowe’s Gladiator was a monumental success the helped turn the actor into a legitimate star. The movie went on to win a load of awards, and even though it seemed like the story was wrapped up by the end, there were talks of a sequel.
Let’s look at the bizarre and wild Gladiator sequel that never was!
It Would Have Been Called “Christ Killer”
Movies that come to a logical and concrete ending are usually not the ones that are in line for a sequel, but Hollywood loves to cash in on an opportunity that they deem worthwhile. Because of this, talks of making a second Gladiator film eventually surfaced, and the story that was dreamed up was one that would have had disastrous consequences.
Penned by musician Nick Cave, the beginning of the movie was going to feature Maximus working with the gods in the afterlife. Yes, you read that correctly. Our favorite gladiator was going to be taking his brutal talents to another life where he would go from fighting men to tracking down and vanquishing Hephaestus.
According to Nick Cave, “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.”
Instead of taking down the god, Maximus would be brought back into the land of living 20 years after his passing. Things eventually come to a head when Maximus leads a group of religious resistance warriors to clash with the Roman Empire.
Sounds pretty wild for a Gladiator movie, right? Trust us when we say that things only get wilder from here.
It Was Going To Feature Time Travel
There are a lot of moving pieces with this movie but one of the more interesting components is that time travel was going to be involved to a certain extent. The BBC did an excellent write up on what went into bringing the script a life and they touched on the time traveling component that would’ve been utilized. Interestingly the publication likened it to the time traveling to the beginning of The Wolverine.
Much like The Wolverine, we would see Maximus end up in some of the biggest wars and conflicts in human history. According to BBC, Maximus “condemned humanity to an eternal cycle of bloodshed, which is a thought-provoking conclusion, but maybe not a crowd-pleasing one.”
Writer Nick Cave would say, “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. It was a stone-cold masterpiece.”
It’s hard to even imagine what this would look like with the characters that we are talking about here, and this could be largely why it was never actually made. Bringing Maximus back is tough enough, but shifting things around so greatly and having time travel involved just sounds like a flick most people would pass on.
With humanity doomed, Maximus wouldn’t stop his appearances at just major conflicts in history.
It Would End In The Modern Age
According to BBC, Maximus was going to end up at the Pentagon in modern times, meaning that he has been able to remain eternal and survive all of the greatest conflicts in history.
When speaking with Den of Geek, Cave would say, “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.”
Ultimately, this sequel never came to life. For one reason or another, the studio decided that one Gladiator film was enough. To be fair, this was probably for the best. Some movies simply need to be left alone and not be touched again. Just because a project is successful does not mean that a sequel needs to be right around the corner.
Gladiator is one of the best movies of its era and had this wild sequel hit theaters, we could be talking about the original in a totally different light.