Russell Crowe reflects on the success of Gladiator and the failure of Gladiator II

Maximus is still angry about the sequel to the cult film.

Released in 2024, Gladiator 2 was a commercial failure with almost as much box office revenue (around $460 million) as the first film, but for twice the budget. Not to mention the mixed reviews and its absence from award shows, where the Gladiator of 2000 won five Oscars including those for best film and best actor for Russell Crowe.

The latter had already publicly disavowed this sequel, and he is not losing his temper. During the Taormina Film Festival, where he received an award for his entire career this weekend, the actor gave it a shout-out, reports Deadline. And according to him, it is indeed the betrayal of “moral heart” of Gladiator which explains the failure of the second film. Crowe recounts beforehand how he fought with the studio so that there was no sex scene in the first one:

“I kept pushing them away. I said it was the story of a man taking revenge for the deaths of his wife and son. There can’t be a point in his journey where he stops to sleep with someone. It doesn’t make sense…it destroys his journey. They fought with me, they sent me letters to convince me, and I stuck to my position. The luck I had was that Ridley, even though he would have loved to write a sex scene between Connie Nielsen and me, agreed with me. And that became the moral heart of the film.”

Russell Crowe goes on to detail what he sees as a misunderstanding around Gladiator and the public to which it is addressed. A female audience who, according to him, attended cinemas more than men when the film was released.

“We wanted to make a film in a resolutely old-fashioned spirit and at the time the studio didn’t really understand why. On the surface, Gladiator is a film for men, but if that were the case it would have been about revenge. It’s a film for women because it’s about revenge, the difference is subtle but it’s a difference. I needed the character to stay that way.”

For the interpreter of Maximus, the principles of Gladiator were not respected in the sequel, released 24 years later, where Paul Mescal plays his son, Lucius. The studio was successful this time, and this is precisely what precipitated the failure of the film:

“The fact that they destroyed this moral thorn in the second film is very interesting because it barely reached the box office of the first film, and if you take into account the inflation that the dollar has experienced for 20 years, they failed. And they failed because they did not understand what made him successful, his moral heart.”