Ridley Scott lays out his plans for Gladiator 2
By Dan Selcke
Gladiator swept the Academy Awards back in 2001, winning Best Picture and Best Actor for Russell Crowe. Director Ridley Scott’s sweeping historical drama about ancient Rome is remembered fondly to this day, and we learned a couple years ago that Scott was planning a sequel.
We didn’t anything for a while after that, but the venerated directed recent gave Empire magazine an update: “I’m already having [the next] Gladiator written now,” he said. “So when I’ve done Napoleon, Gladiator will be ready to go.”
By “Napoleon,” Scott means KitBag, his upcoming movie about French military leader Napoleon Bonaparte. Funnily enough, Napolean will be played by Joaquin Phoenix, who played the deranged emperor Commodus. And the Gladiator sequel, which is being written by The Batman scribe Peter Craig, is about Commodus nephew Lucius, who escaped at the end of the first movie with his mother Lucilla (Connie Nielsen). It all comes together!
The unmade Gladiator sequel where Russell Crowe comes back from the dead and fights in World War II
The second movie would be set 25 years after the first, and likely won’t involve Russell Crowe’s Maximus on account of him being dead. But that wasn’t always the plan. As the BBC laid out a couple of years ago, at one point Crowe hired screenwriter Nick Cave to dream up a Gladiator sequel that involved Maximus waking up in the afterlife and becoming an assassin for the gods in hopes of securing a second chance at life, which he gets only to find himself in the middle of a conflict between tyrannical Roman rulers and early Christian rebels.
And then, we would find out on account of his lifetime of violence Maximus had been cursed to live for eternity, which he spends leading soldiers in the Crusades, the World Wars, and so on. It is a nutso premise that I’m kinda sad we didn’t see come to fruition, although I’m sure Scott’s more grounded take will be good too.
Speaking of Scott, he has two other movies coming out before we even get to KitBag. The Last Duel, about the last legally sanctioned duel in French history, hits theaters on October 15. And the biographical drama House of Gucci lands on November 14. Not bad for an 83-year-old director.
Next. We’ll see Zoë Kravitz’s Catwoman at DC FanDome. dark
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