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With a total of 12 Academy Award nominations and five wins – including the coveted Best Picture prize – it was perhaps only a matter of time before Ridley Scott dusted off his sandals for a sequel to Gladiator.

Scott’s epic action spectacle set a new bar for production design in filmmaking and featured revolutionary special effects, not to mention catapulting Russel Crowe’s career into the realm of Hollywood gods – along with a broody Joaquin Phoenix, of course.

As many probably know, Gladiator tells the historically fictitious story of Maximus (Crowe) – a Roman general who becomes the victim of a coup by Caesar Marcus Aurelius’s own son, Commodus (Phoenix).

Maximus is stripped of his rank and sentenced to be a slave in the fighting pits of Rome’s gladiatorial industry, all while Commodus orders the execution of Maximus’s wife and child. Fueled by vengeance over the slaying of his family, Maximus uses his military expertise to quickly rise through the ranks of Rome’s fiercest gladiators, eventually becoming a symbol of hope for Rome’s persecuted citizens before coming face to face with Emperor Commodus.

For the younger folks who haven’t seen the movie a thousand times, Maximus gets the upper hand but is mortally wounded, leading to a tear-filled ending as he strolls through the grass to meet his wife and child in the sunny afterlife. Audiences wept and the box office boomed.

Whispers of a second Gladiator film began circulating as soon as the first was done, with Russell Crowe himself saying that conversations about a follow-up never truly ceased. Allegedly past ideas have included Gladiator 2 taking a page out of the bible and resurrecting Maximus in a more supernatural approach with Maximus engaging in gladiatorial combat against mythological foes in the Roman afterlife.

As the long-awaited continuation is finally entering production, only time will tell if Gladiator 2 will stay true to its grounded roots or introduce more fantastical elements. Either way, there’s a built-in audience salivating at the idea of another sandal-wearing, blood-spurting, revenge epic.

Paramount Pictures unveiled the first trailer from Gladiator 2 on the stage of The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, a Las Vegas hotel that looks like Ancient Rome except for the slot machines and a stocked bar.

Director Ridley Scott seems to be offering a bloodier version of that distant age with actor Paul Mescal entering the arena this time as a nobleman who has renounced his privilege and finds himself in a life-and-death struggle for the amusement of the Roman people.

Mescal face off against a charging rhino, a horde of vicious baboons, and Pedro Pascal, among other threats to his chiseled physique. There were also naval bombardments, political intrigue aplenty — and a pair of diabolical emperors who seem even crazier than Joaquin Phoenix’s unhinged monarch from the first film.

Denzel Washington also appears as a shadowy operator who seems intent on steamrolling over an empire that’s gone seriously off the rails. “Rome must fall,” he says at one point in the footage. “I need only to give it a push.”

The trip back to Rome is still a ways off, with the film’s expected release date expected to be in November 2024, so expect more details to drip onto our feeds in the coming months.

Please don’t f*** this up, Ridley. We’ve shed too many tears over the first one to have a bad sequel spoil it.

[source:collider]