Russell Crowe is once again slamming Gladiator II.
The 62-year-old actor won an Oscar for Best Actor for his performance in the original 2000 movie, but did not return for the sequel, which was released in 2024 and starred Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, and Denzel Washington. Both movies were directed by Ridley Scott.
While speaking at an event during the 2026 Taormina Film Festival in Italy, Russell looked back at what made the first movie special and shared his thoughts on why the sequel “failed.”
“On the surface, Gladiator is a movie for men but if it was a movie for men, it would be about revenge,” Russell said, per Deadline. “But it’s not about revenge. 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.”
“So for them, in a second movie to destroy that moral centre, it’s very interesting because the second movie barely took the same box office that the first movie took,” he continued, “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, and they failed because they didn’t understand why it was successful, because it had a moral core.”
In an interview from 2024, Russell shared similar sentiments about Gladiator II, saying the sequel didn’t understand “what made that first one special.”
Find out why Paul didn’t reach out to Russell to talk about filming Gladiator II, and if you didn’t see, there has already been talk about a third Gladiator movie.
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