Gladiator 2 (2024)

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https://deadline.com/2018/11/gladiator- ... 202494152/
While he has been eyeing other projects that include a coming of age Merlin movie at Disney, Ridley Scott has begun forward progress on a sequel to Gladiator, the 2000 film which garnered 11 Oscar nominations and five wins including Best Picture and Best Actor for Russell Crowe. While Crowe’s Maximus character met his end in the classic original film, Gladiator 2 will follow the continuing story of Lucius, the son of Lucilla (Connie Nielsen), The youth was the nephew of Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix), the weaselly son of Roman leader Marcus Aurelius who murdered his father seized the throne and wound up in the gladiator ring with Maximus, who though mortally wounded, skewered the emperor before fading into the great beyond to reunite with his slain wife and son. Maximus saved the boy and his mother while avenging his own family, and left a strong impression on the young Lucius. The original was made by DreamWorks and distributed by Universal. Sources said the charge here is being led by Scott and his Scott Free banner. Oscar nominated for the first film, Scott wants to direct the film, and they are setting Peter Craig, whose credits include The Town and two Hunger Games films, as well as 12 Strong and the upcoming Top Gun: Maverick. Sources said Paramount will be the studio developing the project, and Universal has the option to co-finance. DreamWorks is out of it. Crowe’s Maximus is a tough act to follow, but the brutal world of Roman gladiators is so compelling, who wouldn’t be entertained by another plunge into that world?

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They had great ideas for Prometheus and 2049. Their existence was completely justified. This one is just cash grab nonsense.£

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Lame. If you’re gonna do a shitty sequel to this, they should just greenlight the original script for it. It would have been comically bad, but at least it sounded entertaining.

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It's almost as if Ridley's determined to end his career with a whimper.

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ChristNolan wrote:
November 1st, 2018, 4:50 pm
Lame. If you’re gonna do a shitty sequel to this, they should just greenlight the original script for it. It would have been comically bad, but at least it sounded entertaining.
Yup.

Cave’s Gladiator 2 screenplay opens with Maximus waking up in the afterlife. To his disappointment, it isn’t the sun-kissed Elysium he dreamt of in Gladiator, but an endless rain-sodden netherworld where wretched refugees huddle on the shores of a black ocean. With the help of a ghostly guide, Mordecai, Maximus treks to a ruined temple where he meets Jupiter, Mars and five other diseased and decrepit Roman deities. Jupiter explains that one of their number, Hephaestus, has betrayed them, and is now preaching the gospel of another god who is more powerful than all of them. Just to quibble for a moment, Hephaestus is a Greek god, not a Roman one, so Cave should really have named him Vulcan. But the screenplay compensates for this slip with some writing to relish.

Jupiter offers him a deal: if he kills Hephaestus, then he will be reunited with his wife and son in the golden wheat fields of Elysium. It may sound like the premise of a Terry Gilliam film or a Neil Gaiman graphic novel, rather than a blockbuster sequel, but Cave’s Orphean adventure sort of makes sense. All through Gladiator, Maximus longs to see his family again, so there is a certain logic to a plot which keeps that longing alive, even when the person doing the longing isn’t. Once you adjust your expectations, you can settle in and enjoy Gladiator 2 for the supernatural quest movie that it is.

But then, suddenly, it isn’t. No sooner has Maximus tracked down Hephaestus than he is zapped out of the stygian gloom and into the world of flesh and blood, a decade or two after his death. Human again, he travels to Rome in search of his son Marius: did I mention that Marius, who was crucified and burnt to death in Gladiator, is alive and kicking in Gladiator 2?

At this stage, the script focuses on a band of early Christians dodging the Roman authorities, just as they did in the recent Mary Magdalene biopic which co-starred Phoenix. But these scenes also bring back some of the characters and political intrigue from Gladiator. As well as meeting his now-adult son, Maximus bumps into his old sidekick Juba (who was played in the original film by Djimon Hounsou). And the screenplay’s villain is none other than Commodus’s mild-mannered nephew, Lucius, now grown up to be as evil as his uncle. More importantly, Gladiator 2 revisits the Colosseum, where the emperor watches a mock naval battle in an amphitheatre which is flooded with water and stocked with 100 alligators: a comment, perhaps, on the need for sequels to be bigger and more spectacular than their predecessors.

Everything leads to a showdown between Lucius’s Roman enforcers and the Christian resistance army which Maximus and Juba have been training in secret. And then what? Another chat with the Roman Gods? A family reunion in sunny Elysium? Well, no. Instead, Cave has Maximus striding into battle through the centuries: in the Crusades, in the World Wars, in Vietnam, and finally in the Pentagon, in a grander version of the opening montage of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The message is that by choosing armed combat over non-violent resistance, Maximus has condemned humanity to an eternal cycle of bloodshed, which is a thought-provoking conclusion, but maybe not a crowd-pleasing one. Crowe’s reaction, according to Cave, was simple: “Don’t like it, mate.”

Cave wasn’t too bothered. Years later, he told an interviewer, “I enjoyed writing it very much because I knew on every level that it was never going to get made.” And maybe this was the most sensible attitude to have. Maybe Gladiator 2 was never going to happen, and so Cave was right to indulge his own enthusiasm for theological debate along with the kind of millennia-spanning outrageousness that would suit a Darren Aronofsky film more than a Ridley Scott one. Certainly, you have to suspect that Cave was chuckling to himself when he had an emperor complaining, “My giraffe was struck by lightning.”
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/201808 ... nd-its-mad

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Hm... I fear we're going to get a digitally shot, with an insane amount of grey tones and anything but warmth film, as opposed to Gladiator's lush and warm cinematography.

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Nomis wrote:
November 2nd, 2018, 6:11 am
Hm... I fear we're going to get a digitally shot, with an insane amount of grey tones and anything but warmth film, as opposed to Gladiator's lush and warm cinematography.
What does it matter? Just get a good DP who knows what he (or she) is doing.

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It doesn't matter, but ever since Scott went with digital none of his films had the same warmth his film shot films had.

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How long before Ridley tries to make a sequel to Thelma & Louise?

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