While Gladiator 2 had a stacked cast including Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal, a returning Sir Ridley Scott as director, and a big marketing push, it underperformed. The sequel made $462 million compared to the original's $466 million, which would be a lot more if adjusted for inflation.
And, not for the first time, Russell Crowe thinks that it's due to sex scenes.
Speaking at the Taormina Film Festival (via Variety), the actor stated that he kept "pushing back" against the sex scenes that the studio wanted to include.
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"This is the story of a man avenging the death of his wife and his child. There cannot be a moment in that journey where he stops and has sex with somebody", he stated. "It doesn't make any sense because that destroys the journey.
"Luckily for me, Ridley, even though he'd love a sex scene between me and Connie Nielsen, agreed with me back then that that was the emotional core of the film.
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"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. That's 20 years later.
"When you apply how much of a change there's been on the value of a dollar, they failed. They failed because they didn’t understand why [the original movie] was successful — it had a moral core."
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Crowe continued, explaining that the first film tapped into a majority-female audience from its second week onwards, as he believes that people realised that Gladiator is only a movie for men "on the surface".
"If it was a movie for men, it would be about revenge, but it's not about revenge", he said. "It is a movie for women because it is about vengeance.”
In his eyes, the first film was successful because men wanted to be the protagonist and women wanted to be with him, and the sequel didn't.
Gladiator 2 can currently be streamed with a Paramount+ or Sky/NOW Cinema subscription. The first can be bought or rented from various digital storefronts.
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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he's covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small. A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe also enjoys video games and in particular PlayStation. Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I'm a Fish.
