Actor Russell Crowe has shared his thoughts on why the 2024 sequel to 2000’s Gladiator fell short in capturing audience interest when compared to the original. The first film was directed by Ridley Scott as his eleventh feature film and written by David Franzoni, John Logan, and William Nicholson.
It starred Crowe as of a Roman general betrayed by an emperor’s bloodthirsty son.
The sequel saw Scott return as director and featured Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, and Denzel Washington, with Nielsen and Jacobi reprising their original roles.
Crowe also stated his objection to excessive sexually graphic scenes in the original film, as consistently suggested by the studio, stating, “I just kept pushing back.”
“I said, ‘This is a story about a man who’s avenging the death of his wife and his child. There cannot be a moment on that journey where he stops and has sex with somebody,’” Crowe added. “‘It doesn’t make any sense… that destroys the journey’.”
“They fought me, they sent me letters about it and everything, and I just stuck to my guns. Luckily for me, Ridley [Scott], even though he would have loved to write a sex scene with Connie Nielsen and me, he agreed with me back then, and that that was the moral core of the film.”
Crowe also expressed that the end goal for what they were making was “something really, really old-fashioned and the studio kind of, at the time, didn’t quite understand why.”
The star also stressed that gender dynamics and demographics play a part in screenwriting and in the film’s core values, something he believed generated diversity in audiences. “On the surface, Gladiator is a movie for men, but if it was a movie for men, it would be about revenge. But it’s not about revenge,” he added. “It’s a movie for women because it’s about vengeance, and this is a subtle difference, but it is a difference. I needed the character to stay on that track.”
Crowe felt that “the second movie” helped to “destroy that moral centre” yet acknowledged the business side of things, stating he finds it “very interesting because the second movie barely took the same box office that the first movie took.”
The first Gladiator film grossed $466 million worldwide from a budget of $103 million, while its follow-up made a total of $462 million from a $210-310 million budget, a $4 million difference in box office gross paired with a $107-207 million budget difference.
“But that’s 20 years later, and when you apply how much of a change there’s been on the value of a dollar, they failed,” Crowe emphasised. “And they failed because they didn’t understand why it was successful, because it had a moral core.”
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