After years of discussing a sequel to the Oscar-winning hit, Ridley Scott looks ready to return to the coliseum as the director has begun development on a new “Gladiator” pic with Paramount on board to distribute.
“The Town” scribe Peter Craig will pen the script.
The original pic starred Russell Crowe as Maximus, a General in the Roman army, who is betrayed by the Emperor and left for dead while his family is brutally murdered. He is eventually forced to become a gladiator after being captured by slave traders, who lead him back to Rome to fight as a gladiator while plotting his revenge against Emperor that betrayed him.
It’s not known how the story will continue, the original Gladiator ended with the deaths of everyone important.
The Telegraph reports that this isn’t stopping director Ridley Scott from exhuming the swords-and-sandals epic for a new sequel. After years of teasing, a Gladiator 2 is reportedly officially in development, with Scott mulling a return in the director’s chair and a script by Peter Craig.
Crowe, whose iconic Maximus Decimus Meridius was last seen slain in a colosseum and riding off into the afterlife with his dead wife and son (sorry spoiler-phobes), will reportedly not take centre stage in this new version of Gladiator 2, and may not appear at all.
Instead it will (somewhat inevitably) follow the nephew of Joaquin Phoenix’s villainous Commodus and son of Maximus’s ex Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), a character played by a 13-year-old Spencer Treat Clark in the original film and presumably a Jai Courtney/Chris Hemsworth type in this one.
But Crowe’s involvement in a potential sequel had been a sticking point for Scott throughout the nearly two decades since Gladiator’s release, leading to Cave’s unusual hiring. While DreamWorks Pictures, the original film’s financier, were eager for Crowe to return in some capacity, even pursuing the idea of a prequel in order to bring him back, Scott had other plans. He even recruited original Gladiator screenwriter John Logan to draft a Crowe-less sequel, believed to also revolve around Commodus’s nephew, and told Empire in 2003 that it likely wouldn’t even be called Gladiator.
