Although he’s probably going to be kept occupied with the Alien franchise for quite some time (perhaps even the rest of his career, if his recent comments about six more instalments are anything to go by), but filmmaker Ridley Scott has revealed that he remains keen to revisit 2000’s Gladiator, and has an idea as to how he could bring back Russell Crowe’s Maximus, despite his death in the first movie.
“I know how to bring him back,” Scott tells EW. “I was having this talk with the studio — ‘but he’s dead.’ But there is a way of bringing him back. Whether it will happen I don’t know. Gladiator was 2000, so Russell’s changed a little bit. He’s doing something right now but I’m trying to get him back down here.”
There has been talk of a Gladiator sequel ever since the release of the first movie; initial reports said DreamWorks was keen on a follow-up which would take place fifteen years later and follow an older Lucius as he searches for the truth about his real father. However, Scott enlisted Nick Cave to pen a script, which would have seen Maximus reincarnated as an immortal who defends early Christians from the Romans before being transported through other periods in history including World War II, before ending up as a general in the modern-day Pentagon. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was rejected.
Would you like to see Ridley Scott reuniting with Russell Crowe for a Gladiator sequel? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below…
Originally published March 12, 2017. Updated April 15, 2018.
