Russell Crowe has aimed more criticism at Gladiator II, claiming the film lost the original’s “moral core”.
The Australian actor won an Oscar for 2000’s Gladiator, playing Maximus, a Roman soldier who is betrayed by an evil emperor (Joaquin Phoenix), and fights his way to revenge by becoming a gladiator. Ridley Scott continued the story over two decades later in 2024’s Gladiator II, which starred Paul Mescal as a character on a similar journey who, it emerges, turns out to be Maximus’ son.
Crowe, who did not appear in the follow-up due to his character dying in the first film, has been critical of the sequel before and repeated his criticism of the movie at a recent appearance at Taormina Film Festival in Italy, captured by Deadline.
“What happened when we were shooting that film, there was a lot of pressure to bow to a desire that the studio and one of the producers had at the time that there should be sex scenes between Maximus and the female characters,” he explained,
“And I just kept pushing back. This is the 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. It doesn’t make any sense because then that destroys the journey.”
Crowe recalled that he “stuck to my guns.” He said that Scott would have “loved a sex scene between me and [lead actress] Connie Nielsen,” ultimately “he agreed with me back then that that was the moral core of the film.”
Mescal’s character being the son of Maximus reveals that he and Nielsen’s character, Lucilla, had sex prior to the events of the first film. That, in Crowe’s opinion, strayed what he was trying to achieve with the first film.
“For them, in a second movie to destroy that moral centre,” he said. “It’s very interesting, because the second movie barely took the same box office that the first movie took. But, that’s 20 years later.” Gladiator II made $462million (£344million) at the box office, compared to the first film’s haul of $466million (£347million), which doesn’t account for inflation.
“When you apply how much of a change there’s been on the value of a dollar, they failed,” Crowe concluded. “And they failed because they didn’t understand why [the first film] was successful — it was successful because it had a moral core.”