Russell Crowe believes that a lack of “moral core” meant that Gladiator II “failed” to replicate the success of the original film.
The 62-year-old star won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of grieving Roman general Maximus Decimus Meridius in Ridley Scott’s 2000 historical epic but felt that the 2024 sequel – which featured Paul Mescal in the lead role – lost the emotional core that made the original picture so successful.
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Recalling how he resisted studio pressure to feature in sex scenes, Crowe said at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy: “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. 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, even though he would have loved to write a sex scene with me and Connie Nielsen, he agreed with me back then, and that was the moral core of the film.”
The L.A. Confidential star added: “We were shooting for something really, really old-fashioned and the studio kind of, at the time, didn’t quite understand why.”
Crowe explained how his stance was vindicated when more women than men turned up to watch Gladiator at cinemas.
He said: “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. 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 but that’s 20 years later, and when you apply how much of 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.”
Crowe had made similar comments about the sequel last year as he branded Gladiator II “unfortunate”.
He told Australian radio station Triple J: “The recent sequel that we don’t have to name out loud is a really good example of, even the people in that engine room not actually understanding what made that first one special.
“It wasn’t the pomp. It wasn’t the circumstance. It wasn’t the action. It was the moral core.”
