How much of a badass is Nick Cave? His long and storied career as leader of the Birthday Party and the Bad Seeds has yielded countless classic songs and albums, and he continues to make quality music to this day. He also writes novels, scores films, and writes screenplays. The 2005 western The Proposition, for which he wrote the screenplay, was a critical hit, and he's currently got another film in the works called Death of a Ladies' Man. So, yeah, he's a pretty major badass.

But this might make him even more of a badass: Rolling Stone and the Guardian report that actor Russell Crowe asked Cave to write a script for the sequel to Ridley Scott's 2000 blockbuster Gladiator, which won a bunch of Oscars and everybody loved. The main character, the gladiator Maximus (played by Crowe), dies at the end of the film, so a sequel would be tricky. But not impossible!

The Guardian points to the blog Gone Elsewhere, which has a synopsis of the script, and oh man, this thing sounds AMAZING. If this blog is to be believed, in the script, Maximus is granted eternal life by the Roman gods, so he spends most of the film trying to reunite with his son, who has joined an army of early Christians. There are a lot of epic fight scenes (duh). But the best part is the finale, which is apparently a montage of Maximus showing up during battles throughout modern history, including World War II and Vietnam. The script ends with Maximus in the Pentagon.

Of course, the script was rejected by the studio, possibly for being too awesome...or because the story is entirely implausible and not in keeping with the spirit of the original. But that hasn't stopped Hollywood before, right?