Gladiator was one of those seminal films that if you were the right age and saw it at the right time has stuck in your mind since then. I was both at the right and at the right time so the movie for me is one of my favorites from direction to score to performances. It is also a movie that doesn’t need a sequel, but here we are with Ridley Scott pushing forward for one. The director is evidently working with screenwriter Peter Craig to get the ball rolling on Gladiator 2, with Paramount already onboard to develop it.
This sequel is said to focus on Lucius, the son of Lucilla, who Maximus saves by defeating the evil Marcus Aurelius in gladiatorial combat at the end of the first film before dying and going off to run his hands through wheat while the sun sets. Evidently, the young Lucius was quite taken with Maximus. It’s not clear how the story will carry on from there, but I’d expect there to be more fights with gladiators and a lot less Russell Crowe.
Obviously, Gladiator was a big hit and made a ton of money, and it garnered Scott a bunch of award nominations and wins so you can see why both director and studio would be excited to return to the world. However, Scott’s record with needless sequels and reboots is not good at all, and despite the story sounding like it could deliver a strikingly different film, I don’t have faith that it would. Gladiator defines a bunch of tropes and cliches that would just seem trite if they simply ape them here instead of doing something new.
The sequel is still very early on, though, so we’ll have to wait and see what becomes of it.
Ridley Scott Moving Forward With ‘Gladiator 2’; Peter Craig To Write Script For Paramount [Deadline]
