Russell Crowe says Gladiator II failed because ‘it didn’t have a moral core’

The star added that the original film appealed to a female audience ‘because it’s not about revenge, it is about vengeance’ – and because it didn’t have a gratuitous sex scene Russell Crowe has said that the Gladiator sequel was a failure because it lacked a “moral core” and that studio behind it “didn’t understand why [the original movie] was successful”. Crowe was speaking at the Taormina film festival, and in remarks reported by Variety he outlined why the thought the first Gladiator, released to considerable acclaim and box office success in 2000, was a success, and where its sequel, released in 2024, struggled. Crowe said that his refusal to shoot a sex scene with Connie Nielsen, who played his former lover Lucilla, gave the first Gladiator its “emotional core”. “When we were shooting that film, there was a lot of pressure. The studio, the producers [thought] there should be sex between Maximus and the female characters. I kept pushing back. 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. It doesn’t make any sense because that destroys the jou