This Was Eric Idle’s Pitch for a ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ Sequel

Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which turns 50 this year, is clearly one of best comedies ever made. And, barring some sort of dark twist in the Peter Rabbit series, it’s the best movie to feature a bloodthirsty bunny gnawing someone’s head off.

While the idea of sequelizing this beloved classic may seem foolish to some, it very nearly happened. Back in 1997, Eric Idle pitched a Holy Grail follow-up to the rest of the Pythons. Although the project never came to fruition, Idle’s original outline survives. He’s currently selling copies of The Final Crusade, but he also posted info about it on his blog in 2013.

According to Idle, The Final Crusade was to be “about a group of grumpy old men being pressured to get back together again for a last quest,” which would “allow us to mock ourselves.” And that mockery wasn’t exactly subtle. “Robin had become a salesman in France, and Lancelot was on his third wife,” Idle once explained. 

There was a character named after their longtime producer (“Sir John Goldstone”) and King Arthur, originally played by Graham Chapman, is “long since dead.” Although, as Terry Gilliam recalled, the group came up with a way to include the late actor: having the Knights carry around a box of holy relics that could speak, and would be voiced by Chapman, thanks to “outtakes of Graham from the albums.” Idle’s recollection is that the knights were tasked with “taking King Arthur’s ashes to Jerusalem.”

But, per Idle, the knights’ reluctant Crusade is quickly interrupted when they’re “lured to Venice” with promises of “beautiful women and cash” and get “screwed by the Italians.” “In order to get money to go to the Holy Land, they had to go and do certain jobs in Venice and places like that,” Palin noted. “So we had this idea of all the Python knights trying to get our act together to go off to the Crusades. Which I thought was a great idea because it paralleled Python’s slight inability to get its own act together.”

Idle has written at length about how everyone in the group was initially intrigued by the idea, even John Cleese. The concept was so promising that the Pythons decided to gather together in person in Buckinghamshire, U.K. to discuss the matter. But by then, Cleese had changed his mind, and announced at the start of their meeting that he didn’t want to make another Python film after all.

“Don’t you think you might have mentioned this sooner?” asked Gilliam, who had taken a red eye from Los Angeles while preparing to direct Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Cleese proclaimed that he simply hated filming. After he admitted that he was about to begin work on a different movie project — “Aha, so it’s just filming with us he doesn’t want to do,” Idle thought to himself — Palin was able to convince Cleese to agree to three weeks of work on the Holy Grail sequel before he fell asleep.

Before departing, the group decided that Palin and Terry Jones would take a crack at a first draft of the Final Crusade screenplay, and Cleese proposed another Python reunion once Gilliam’s film had wrapped. But that never happened. “Nothing came of the film. The distances were just too great and by this time we hadn’t worked together in 15 years,” Idle wrote. “It certainly wasn’t John’s fault.”

Of course, that may have been the last time that Idle suggested something wasn’t John Cleese’s fault.