Nick Cave (not be confused with Nick Cave) told Marc Maron that Russell Crowe asked him to write a script for Gladiator 2. Crowe watched the Australian western The Proposition that Cave wrote with John Hillcoat and liked it. When Cave asked Crowe, “Hey, Russell, didn’t you die in Gladiator 1?” Crowe answered, “Yeah, you sort that out,” and then “Don’t like it, mate,” after reading Cave’s script for Gladiator 2: Christ Killer… But doesn’t sound so good, as Nick Cave describes it?
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 all his followers… 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’s tricked by the gods and all of this sort of stuff. So it ends with, 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.
Unreal. Or is it?
The script is currently sitting on my desk. It’s popped up via Dangerous Minds, but David Gerard shared it on Google a bit before that. Mr. Gerard then pointed ANIMAL further back to May 2009 where it appeared here.
LET US SWEDE! Seriously.
It’s Scribd upload is embedded at the bottom of this post for your reading pleasure, but here are some of the really good bits.
…Several pages into the script…
Alright. NOW THE AFOREMENTIONED FINAL BATTLE SCENE!
Oh. I see. And the end?
***SPOILER ALERT***
