While at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas this past weekend, director Ridley Scott was asked by EW about the long-rumored sequel to his Oscar winning hit Gladiator, and his interest in bringing back Russell Crowe. This was his response:
“I know how to bring him back. 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.”
Back in 2009, Scott had commissioned writer/musician Nick Cave to write a sequel in which Russell Crowe’s character Maximus, who (spoiler) dies at the end of the film, is travelling through the afterlife. Whether this is what he is referring to in unknown, but as Scott stated, Crowe looks a bit older than he did seventeen years ago, so a prequel in unlikely. Despite some historical inaccuracies, Gladiator is still based in reality, and though we do see glimpses of what Maximus sees as the afterlife, an entire film in this setting could come off as just silly.