āI’ve got the beginning of a very good footprint,” says director Ridley Scott as he reveals that a percentage of Gladiator 3ās script has already been written.
Ridley Scott is going full tilt at making Gladiator 3 happen and itās a wonderful thing to see. Itās obvious to the world at large that any chance of a third film happening will depend on the fortunes of the soon-to-release Gladiator 2, starring Paul Mescal as the titular warrior. However, rather than play coy and wait and see how the film performs, Sir Ridley has abandoned all caution and announced not only that he wants to make the film, but that itās already being written.
“I’ve already got eight pages,ā Scott told Total Film āI’ve got the beginning of a very good footprint.” When asked if he could offer any details as to the direction of the story, he replied: “If there’s a Gladiator 3, I don’t think you’d ever go back into the arena. But I had to go back into the arena.”
Sounds ominously like a play on Jaws to us, but who knows whatās running through Scottās mind as he plans another entry in the series? We saw tigers in the original 2000 film and thereās been plenty of talk regarding baboons in the upcoming sequel. The filmās trailer showed off all kinds of wildlife that we wonāt spoil here in case you havenāt yet seen it.
Scottās confidence may yet pay off. Buzz surrounding the film has been strong and Scott was quick to announce he was working on another entry last month, even going so far as to discuss the ending of Gladiator 2, although thankfully not in great detail. Scott is simply a force of nature at this point, and naturally, we still have his press tour to look forward to as well. We donāt yet know what kind of commercial levels Gladiator 2 is going to have to reach to make a follow-up happen, with Paramount already publicly denying that the filmās production budget ran past the $300m mark.
The whole saga is very absorbing, and we imagine that Scott (or the screenwriter working with him, given heās not exactly known for writing scripts by himself) has probably blasted out another eight pages in the time that itās taken to write this post. Gladiator 2 releases on 22nd November and if you want to check out the filmās latest trailer, itās right here.