- Ridley Scott isn’t ready to leave the Colosseum just yet, with words already committed to pages for Gladiator 3 (probably also stylised as Gladiator III).
- “The next [film] will therefore be about a man who does not want to be where he is,” the legendary director teased.
- Gladiator 2, meanwhile, is scheduled to hit cinemas this November.
Just weeks away from the long-awaited sequel’s premiere — and in defiance of what many fans have already deemed meddling with the mythology (more on this later) — director Ridley Scott has indicated the wheels are already in motion for Gladiator 3.
“I’m already playing with the idea of Gladiator 3. No, seriously! I lit the wick,” he told Total Film.
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“I’ve already got eight pages. I’ve got the beginning of a very good footprint… If there’s a Gladiator 3, I don’t think you’d ever go back into the arena. But I had to go back into the arena.”
Scott added of the trilogy completer, which we can only assume would also be stylised as Gladiator III: “The end of Gladiator II evokes that of The Godfather, with Michael Corleone who finds himself with a job he did not want, and who wonders, ‘And now, Father, what am I doing?’ The next [film] will therefore be about a man who does not want to be where he is.”
Guess that also answers any lingering questions about whether Paul Mescal’s Lucius Verus survives.
The news comes in the wake of a rather controversial revelation featured in the second Gladiator 2 trailer: Lucius (originally portrayed by Spencer Treat Clark) is now the confirmed product of the once-implied love affair between Russell Crowe’s Maximus Decimus Meridius and Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla.
A detail that hasn’t exactly been received with universal praise. And it was something that even surprised the Gladiator 2 leading man himself.
“He mentioned it in the talk, but then it’s an affronting thing to see it written on the page, and [to have] that responsibility fall on your shoulders is interesting… I was like, ‘Holy s**t,’” Mescal told Entertainment Weekly.
“The screenplay does a lot of that work for you in terms of the rubbing the dirt between the hands, the kind of DNA, and the genetics that Lucius inherits. So I kind of tried to park that to one side because ultimately, where Lucius is coming from at the start of the film, he has a very different journey than Maximus does.”
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“And I was hoping that whatever DNA and even just the physical gestures was going to be one part of, and a kind of small part of, the performance. But then what I tried to do is figure out exactly who Lucius was and where those differences lay between Lucius and Maximus.”
Perhaps a Godfather-esque trilogy could work out, depending on how this one performs commercially. Although relatively paltry returns from his last four films haven’t seemed to slow the studios’ willingness to let Mr Scott play. And there’s always a chance he could self-finance a la Francis Ford Coppola and his own epic misfire in Megalopolis; solely rivalled by Joker: Folie a Deux in terms of 2024 box office bombs.
Gladiator 2 is scheduled to premiere on November 22nd, 2024 (US) and November 15th, 2024 (Australia/International) — let’s hope it’ll actually be worth the wait.
