How Maximus Returns In Gladiator 2 Every Theory (& What Scotts Revealed)

How Maximus Returns In Gladiator 2: Every Theory (& What Scott’s Revealed)

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Now that Gladiator director Ridley Scott is officially working on a sequel, what are the theories on how Gladiator 2 plans to undo Maximus’ death?

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How Maximus Returns In Gladiator 2 Every Theory (& What Scotts Revealed)

Director Ridley Scott has said he is currently working on the long-awaited sequel to Gladiator, raising serious questions about how Gladiator 2 will bring back the iconic Maximus. For a long time, the filmmaker avoided a return to his Oscar-winning sword and sandals epic. However, despite the apparent sense of finality in the first film, there is now a very real possibility that a follow-up won’t be far away.

Russell Crowe’s Gladiator hero Maximus is a legendary action protagonist. Introduced in 2000’s Gladiator, the humbled former general spends Gladiator’s runtime being enslaved, becoming a gladiatorial champion, and eventually avenging his father-figure Marcus Aurelius’ murder thanks to his newfound status. However, like many action heroes before him, Maximus ends Gladiator by sacrificing his life in service of his mission. It is a moving and tragic ending, and one that saw Crowe deservedly earn an Oscar for the role. Now, having already returned to the Alien franchise, director Ridley Scott claims that he will soon be making Gladiator 2 despite the canon death of Crowe’s hero.

Scott has not yet explained exactly how he plans to work around Maximus’ demise, but he has hinted at numerous options over the years. Singer/songwriter Nick Cave wrote an infamous script draft for Gladiator 2 that would have seen Maximus brought back from the dead after some time spent in the afterlife, but the premise was a bit too eccentric for Crowe and Scott to commit to at the time. Meanwhile, Gladiator producer Doug Wick offered a solution with roots in Christian symbolism, while Crowe’s agent had a more original Gladiator 2 plan that involved shamelessly retconning the original Gladiator’s ending to bring back the character. Each theory for Maximus’ return has its positive and negative aspects, and Scott has remained notably tight-lipped about which—if any—he plans to use to make sense of the Gladiator hero’s revival. Here’s how the sequel could happen.

Nick Cave’s Gladiator 2 Theory

How Maximus Returns In Gladiator 2 Every Theory (& What Scotts Revealed)

In Cave’s draft of the Gladiator 2 script, the franchise abandons the relatively realistic if heightened historical melodrama of the original Gladiator in favor of full-on fantasy/mythology. Cave’s draft opens with Maximus not only definitively dead but in the afterlife and conversing with gods. Maximus returns to earth by possessing the body of a fallen soldier, but the idea is less of a typical horror movie possession plot and more of a spiritual rebirth for the same character, albeit in a new body. The Roman gods would have kept Crowe’s Gladiator character waiting in the afterlife for a while until the perfect martyr died in battle, at which point they would helpfully allow Maximus to use this felled soldier’s body as a vessel for his spirit.

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Once Maximus secured a new body in Cave’s script, he then went about stopping the slaughter of Christians by his former lover’s son, Lucius. Interestingly, despite being subtitled ‘Christ Killer,’ Cave’s strange Gladiator 2 script draft never explained why Roman pre-Christian gods were sending Maximus to save Christians who didn’t believe in them. The script is filled with these sort of trippy contradictions, but as Scott proved with his final Blade Runner cut, the director does thrive on ambiguity. As such, elements of Cave’s admittedly wild script may still make it into the director’s sequel. However, this Gladiator 2 script was not the only one to bring Crowe’s Maximus back by Christianity-inspired means, although one other theory was a lot more obvious about its inspiration.

Doug Wick’s Gladiator 2 Theory

How Maximus Returns In Gladiator 2 Every Theory (& What Scotts Revealed)

Gladiator producer Doug Wick also had a plan to bring back Crowe’s hero, and it leaned hard into the Christian symbolism of the character’s death. However, the plan may have borrowed a bit too much from its religious inspiration. According to a 2020 interview, Crowe claimed that Wick suggested Maximus’ body be brought by his followers into a stone tomb and anointed with oils, only for the hero to return after a few days when the stone was rolled back and his tomb was empty. While Ridley Scott has subjected beloved heroes to strange fates before, such as his original plan for Elizabeth Shaw in Prometheus, bringing back Maximus by recreating the passion of Christ would be a route that could earn groans from general audiences and the ire of Christian viewers. Crowe’s hero is seemingly an ordinary human in the original Gladiator and doesn’t commune with God, making this miraculous revival an odd and out-of-place reveal that could fare even worse than Cave’s trippier, but more thoroughly explained resurrection.

Russell Crowe’s Agent’s Gladiator 2 Theory

How Maximus Returns In Gladiator 2 Every Theory (& What Scotts Revealed)

Maybe the most shameless option available to the Gladiator franchise creators, Russell Crowe’s agent floated an idea to Wick that could have seen the character of Maximus revived with maximum efficiency. Unfortunately, the idea also undoes the poignant, perfect ending of the original Gladiator. After Gladiator, like The Green Knight, proved a big box-office success despite being a historical drama, Crowe’s agent called Wick with a proposed avenue for Maximus’ revival. Crowe’s agent offered the option of Gladiator 2 revealing that Maximus never really died but was instead just pretending. This idea would have seen Maximus’ body revealed to be a fake, and the real character somehow being alive and well after the original Gladiator’s ending. Of course, this strips the character of his heroism and the weight of his sacrifice, but it is the only Gladiator 2 revival theory that sticks to the realistic, fantasy-free tone of Scott’s original Gladiator.

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What Scott Has Said About Maximus’ Gladiator 2 Return

Scott’s few comments on how Maximus will return in Gladiator 2 have not painted a clear picture of the route Crowe’s character will take to his eventual screen revival. As proven by his dismissal of Noah Hawley’s upcoming Alien TV series, Scott is not overly interested in building up hype around the franchises he is involved in, and his terse comments on Gladiator 2 have proven hard to decipher as a result. In a 2017 interview, Scott said he “knew how (he) would bring him back,” referring to Cave’s script draft and its ‘new body, human vessel’ plot, but it is unclear whether the director intended to use this storyline or if he was referring to one of many options. More recently, in a September 2021 interview with Empire, Scott said he was currently having Gladiator 2 written and was “ready to go” on the sequel after his Napoleon movie was released, but said nothing about how the story would pan out. Thus, there is no knowing how Ridley Scott plans to revive Russell Crowe’s Maximus for Gladiator 2, but there is no doubt that the Gladiator director has plenty of options at his disposal.

More: Everything We Know About Gladiator 2

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/gladiator-2-maximus-russell-crowe-return-alive-dead-theories/

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