In Cave’s version, Gladiator II would have closed with a 20-minute montage depicting Maximus—now apparently rendered immortal, possibly as a punishment for his defiance of the gods’ will—fighting in a succession of historical wars, from the Crusades all the way to Vietnam. Finally, we see him in the present day, wearing a suit and tie and washing his hands at a men’s room sink. He returns to work—taking a seat at the table in a Pentagon war room. In context, particularly if this movie had come out in the early 2000s, the implication would have been that Maximus ends up becoming a Donald Rumsfeld–like figure running the so-called War on Terror. Onward, Christian soldiers! This is one of many reasons this movie was probably doomed.
Oh, and: Nick Cave wanted to call it Christ Killer.
“I enjoyed writing it very much,” Cave told Maron, “because I knew on every level that it was never going to get made.” According to Cave, even Crowe was not entertained: Cave recalls him saying, “Don’t like it, mate,” after his first read, and when Cave asked him specifically about the ending, Crowe responded, “Don’t like it, mate,” again. But in an interview with Deadline last week, Scott himself remembered Crowe being “fully engaged,” and said that although Cave had done “a great job of invention,” he—Scott—was the one who couldn’t see it.
“I was going along with the boys. I didn’t really believe in it. It got too rich and started to go to time warps, which frankly I thought was bloody silly,” Scott said. “I think we ended up in the trenches in World War I. That’s when I said, okay, that’s it. Thank you. I think the gravy was too rich.”
There is exactly one way in which the memory of Cave’s script seems to echo in the Gladiator sequel Scott eventually made—the moment, toward the end of the film, where we see Christians fighting for their lives in a Colosseum that’s been flooded and “roils with one hundred alligators.” This gonzo but apparently somewhat historically accurate scene also appears in Gladiator II—but Ridley Scott, a man who knows exactly when and how to thicken the gravy, replaces the alligators with sharks.
