The original Gladiator may have ended with the deaths of everyone important, but that 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.

Craig is a screenwriter of some cachet, having scripted The Town, the final Hunger Games movies and the forthcoming Top Gun: Maverick – but he’s also not Nick Cave, the shock individual previously recruited to bring Russell Crowe back to the franchise. His version of the script, which leaked online in 2009, was a wacky oddity that truly needs to be read to be believed, with Cave exploring time travel, crocodile armies and the Pentagon.

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.