Russell Crowe has said he believes the 2024 sequel to Gladiator didn’t garner as strong a reception as its predecessor because it lacked a "moral code."
On Saturday (June 13), 26 years after the release of Gladiator, Crowe spoke at the Taormina Film Festival about his experience working on the Academy Award-winning film, while also explaining why he felt Gladiator II "failed" to connect with viewers.
In the clip below, the Australian actor revealed that he protested planned sex scenes for his character of Maximus in the first film, believing that it was unrealistic for a man mourning the loss of his wife. "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," Crowe said.
While production "fought" Crowe on his stance, director Ridley Scott agreed with his leading man and refrained from writing the scene with Crowe and Connie Nielsen, who played Lucilla.
The Academy Award-winning actor went on to argue that rather than it being a "revenge" film fit for male viewers, Gladiator was geared towards "vengeance" and had mostly women as fans.
"So for them, in a second movie to destroy that moral centre," Crowe 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, 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."
Released on November 22, 2024, Gladiator II stars Paul Mescal as Lucius, the son of Maximus, opposite Denzel Washington as Macrinus and Pedro Pascal as Acacius. Despite Crowe’s dislike for the film, it grossed over $462 million globally, close to the $466 million worldwide gross of the inaugural film.
As People reported in 2024, it was Scott’s hope to resurrect Maximus in Gladiator II. "The only way of doing it was to go to another battle and through a dying warrior, he comes back into the spirit of the warrior," Scott recalled of his idea to bring Crowe’s character back. "So that's his portal."
However, Crowe rejected the idea. "He said, 'So that's no fucking good, is it?'" Scott recalled the actor saying. "It didn't really work."
