As a very wise, very violent man who wouldn’t stop talking about his dead wife once said, what we do in this life echoes in eternity. Gladiator’s Maximum might have been talking about his own legacy, but he could just as well have been talking about Hollywood sequels: Gladiator 2, the follow-up to Ridley Scott’s Oscar-winning opus, is gathering steam.

The ubiquitous Pedro Pascal has now reportedly signed up to join Paul Mescal on a sequel to the swords-and-soliloquies epic, with Scott returning to direct and a whole phalanx of stars including Denzel Washington and Barry Keoghan. The Gladiator 2 buzz is extremely loud. It is only going to get louder as we get closer to release.

While the internet-breaking cast can take some credit for that, it’s also because there’s so much mystery around the film. Mescal will reportedly play Lucius, son of Lucilla, Maximus’ old flame in Gladiator and nephew of Joaquin Phoenix’s emperor Commodus, as he takes to the throne. That certainly makes thematic sense, but it is not the only Gladiator 2 idea that’s been kicked about. In fact, a Gladiator sequel has been one of those much longed-for ideas which is dusted off every now and again, only to disappear once again.

Nick Cave’s leaked script – yes, that Nick Cave – for Gladiator 2 was particularly intriguing. It picked up in Elysium where the first film ended, But instead of wandering through fields of wheat, we met Maximus face-down in the mud, having his gear nicked by vagabonds. The gods give him the job of tracking down renegade deity Hephaestus and he wakes up in the body of another Roman many years after his death, before what would have been one of the all-time what-the-fuck endings: cursed to live forever, Maximus has to fight through the Crusades, two world wars and Vietnam, before getting a job at the Pentagon.

It’s not exactly multiplex catnip (though stranger things have happened), and at the moment, it’s hard to parse people’s appetite for big-screen historical epics. 2022’s The Northman – with its imaginative fight sequences and emotionally unavailable hunk – cost around $70 million, though took in only $69 million at the box office. While it was critically lauded, those figures were never going to start a goldrush. After Gladiator, there was Troy, 300, the TV series Rome, Colin Farrell giving a very Irish kind of Macedonian king in Alexander. As bold and noble a swing as it was, there’s been no such rush to piggyback on The Northman.

Why? Partly it’s the money – recreating ancient times and places is pretty expensive – but there’s also a lot more competition. Historical epics do two things really well: bombastic battle sequences, and sprawling stories about gods and rulers and portentous, cod-Shakespearean dialogue which only really makes sense when everyone’s wearing togas.

Along with the musical and the Western, the historical epic was a pillar of what made cinema its own distinct thing. Since the superhero era, though, there’s not really been much extra space for either of those things. If you want portentous monologuing about great and terrible powers and the responsibility of gods to mortals, Marvel’s been doing that since Thor. Need some large-scale slaughter and heroic self-sacrifice? Tony Stark’s right over here.

Superhero movies nicked the genre’s moves, and then added a little sprinkle of bubbly, post-ironic irreverence to sidestep its major problem: all that pomposity brings the danger of being unintentionally funny. Brad Pitt’s rousing speech to his charges as Achilles in Troy – “You know what’s waiting out there? Immortality! Take it! It’s yours!” – is rather undercut by his Greece-via-Oklahoma accent, and it only gets more funny the more it tries to make you take it seriously.

How will Gladiator 2 fare? It has great pedigree and a great cast, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll get The Martian Ridley Scott rather than House of Gucci Ridley Scott (it has been a very up-and-down decade for the 85-year-old legend). So: either an award-winning return to form for the genre or a laughing stock. The worst possibility? A forgotten relic, gathering dust, never to be thought of, either in this life or eternity.