Coming along more than twenty years after director Ridley Scott‘s Best Picture-winning original, Gladiator II is ready to reach theatres, courtesy of Paramount Pictures (domestic) on November 22, 2024 and Universal Pictures (international) on November 15th. A trailer is set to drop online on July 9th, and a week ahead of that date Vanity Fair has unveiled multiple images from the film – and also revealed a lot about the plot! One image can be seen above, and the rest can be found at the bottom of this article.
Directed by Scott from a screenplay by his Napoleon writer David Scarpa, Gladiator II stars Paul Mescal (Normal People) as Lucius, last seen as the young son of Lucilla, Connie Nielsen’s noblewoman from the original movie. Nielsen also returns in the sequel, playing one of the few true-life figures in the otherwise fictional Gladiator storyline, the daughter of the late emperor Marcus Aurelius. As Gladiator II picks up her story, decades have passed and Lucius has come of age far away from his mother. While he was still a child, Lucilla sent him to the northern coast of Africa, to a region called Numidia that was (at that point) just outside the reach of the Roman Empire. He never fully understood why, and as he grew stronger, so did his resentment—even if his mother’s reasons had been pure. Lucius has a wife and child, and lives a relatively peaceful life with them until conquerors from his homeland begin to encroach. Leading that charge is Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal of The Last of Us), a Roman general said to have trained as a junior officer under Crowe’s character, although he wasn’t seen in the first movie. Lucius, once the grandson of the emperor of Rome, finds himself a prisoner of it and is sent to the arena to die. Lucilla doesn’t recognize the battered creature in the Colosseum as her son, and has no idea about the bloody history between him and the man she loves, Marcus Acacius. Naturally, the film eventually finds Lucius and Acacius locking swords again, but then Lucius is prepared to fight everything and everyone. Throughout Gladiator II, the reluctant hero encounters a number of other colorful and dubious characters. Denzel Washington (The Equalizer) plays a dashing powerbroker named Macrinus. Two relatively young brothers rule the vast empire, with Fred Hechinger (Thelma) as Emperor Caracalla and Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things) as Emperor Geta.
To read commentary on the plot and characters from Scott and some of the actors, click over to the Vanity Fair link.
While Russell Crowe was openly critical of the script for the original Gladiator, saying there were only 26 useful pages in the whole thing, Mescal feels the opposite about the Gladiator II script. He told Vanity Fair the sequel is about, “What human beings will do to survive, but also what human beings will do to win. We see that in the arena, but also in the political struggle that’s going on outside of my character’s storyline, where you see there’s other characters striving and pulling for power. Where’s the space for humanity? Where’s the space for love, familial connection? And ultimately, will those things overcome this kind of greed and power? Those things are oftentimes directly in conflict with each other.“
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