(Image credit: Paramount)

It’s been 24 years since the first Gladiator was released, but it seems we may not be waiting as long for a third film.

As director Ridley Scott tells Total Film in our final issue out on Thursday, October 10, which features Gladiator 2 on the cover, he isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.

He tells TF of Gladiator 3: “I’ve already got eight pages. I’ve got the beginning of a very good footprint.” While it’s a tiny tease, Scott also hinted about a direction to it when speaking about returning to the Colosseum in Rome for Gladiator 2. “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…” Very intriguing indeed.

Scott also opened up about the legacy of Gladiator in our cover story. “The first movie really definitely touched the imagination in a way I didn’t quite expect. Because when they heard that Ridley is doing a Roman epic – a sword-and-spear-and-sandal movie – there was a lot of sniggering,” he recalls. “Because up to that date, they’d always been very, you know, old-style Hollywood. And I knew what to do.”

Gladiator would go on to be a huge success, winning multiple Oscars and cementing Russell Crowe as a movie star. “And from that, I, in a funny kind of way, modernized Roman-epic kind of films,” continues Scott. “Then, you know, it spawns a lot of other guys in leather skirts and stuff.”

Gladiator 2 is released on November 15. And you can read more about it and a whole lot else besides in the final issue of Total Film when it hits shelves and digital newsstands on Thursday, October 10.

Check out the covers below: