Winning an Oscar for his epic performance in Gladiator in 2000, Russell Crowe was in the mood to capitalise on a sequel, ringing Australian singer, poet and author Nick Cave to write a script.

Made with a budget of $US100 million and delivering global box office receipts in excess of $US465m, the Ridley-Scott directed blockbuster won five Oscars and went down in history as one of the all-time Hollywood masterpieces.

The film didn’t cry out for a sequel – his character, Maximus Decimus Meridius, died inside the Colosseum.

More than two decades later, as Gladiator II hits cinemas amid worldwide pomp and ceremony with applause for the clever storyline based around Maximus’ son, Lucius as a grown man – the King sat through the London premiere last week – it has emerged a flattered Cave had indeed put pen to paper.

The working title was Gladiator 11: Christ Killer.

Speaking on Josh Horowitz’s Happy, Sad Confused podcast last year, Crowe, 61, was asked about the Cave script, admitting he came up with the idea so he could play the lead again.

“I brought Nick into that process and I was the one who paid him to do a draft,” he says.

Crowe said the team they were involved with preferred a straight-up sequel story where Maximus was merely injured in that final battle scene – not killed by Commodos – and he was put in a cave and cured of his injuries with herbs.

Stuck in limbo

“Three days later they opened the cave and [he’s] out …  it’s a miracle … you can’t get the rights to that book.”

Crowe’s premise was that Maximus had killed too many people to make it into heaven, but he was too good a man to be “cast into hell”.

“… so you meet Maximus in a refugee camp on the Somalian border and when you meet him, you realise that he’s in limbo … he’s stuck between worlds.”

The process of getting him back to Earth, Crowe says, was “justifiable and cool”, but producers weren’t in lock-step, and Crowe got busy.

Elsewhere, Scott said Cave’s draft – a supernatural, century spanning screenplay – was a brilliant piece of story-telling but  convincing studios to give it the green light was too big a hurdle.

“We tried [to go with Cave’s script],” Scott told The Guardian, quoting now defunct website, UGO.

“Russell didn’t want to let it go, obviously, because it worked very well. When I say ‘worked very well’, I don’t refer to success. I mean, as a piece it works very well.

“Storytelling, [it] works brilliantly. I think [Cave] enjoyed doing it, and I think it was one of those things that he thought, ‘Well, maybe there’s a sequel where we can adjust the fantasy and bring [Maximus] back from the dead.'”

The sequel we could have had

As the world was wakening to a Gladiator sequel in the works in 2018, with Scott once again at the helm and the search for a new younger star underway, the writing was on the wall for Cave’s script – it would never see the light of day.

Crowe later confirmed he was not involved in the new project because he was dead.

“I’m six feet under,” he said.

“Cave has Maximus striding into battle through the centuries: In the Crusades, in the world wars, in Vietnam, and finally in the Pentagon, in a grander version of the opening montage of X-Men Origins: Wolverine,” wrote the BBC at the time.

“The message is that by choosing armed combat over non-violent resistance, Maximus has condemned humanity to an eternal cycle of bloodshed, which is a thought-provoking conclusion, but maybe not a crowd-pleasing one.”

The BBC reported that Crowe’s reaction, according to Cave’s earlier account in a 2013 WTF podcast with Mark Maron, was simple: “Don’t like it, mate.”

IndieWire reported Cave told Maron that he knew his self-described “stone cold masterpiece” was a “popcorn dropper” and was never going to get made.

So what happened to the script?

“It ended in the men’s bathroom at the Pentagon.”