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If you’ve ever watched Letterboxd’s Four Favorites video series on social media, you’ll be more than aware that a lot of men really love Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, which remains understandable in a decade where “my Roman Empire” has been trending.
Scott’s crowd-pleasing, awards-hogging, fist-pumping action-adventure flick explores themes of honor, courage, loyalty, and brotherhood, and its central character, Maximus Decimus Meridius (portrayed by Russell Crowe), remains true to his principles and fights for something greater than himself until he becomes a true “soldier of Rome” in death.
The 2000 epic also has a really strong fan base among women, and that’s by design rather than accident, argues its star. In a recent appearance at the Taormina Film Festival (via Deadline) Crowe explained that Gladiator is actually a movie for women, not men.
The actor contextualized his conclusion by discussing the battle he once had with the movie’s studio over its eagerness to get Maximus involved in more sex scenes as Gladiator’s story played out.
“I just kept pushing back. I said, ‘This is a story about a man who’s avenging the death of his wife and his child. There cannot be a moment on that journey where he stops and has sex with somebody. It doesn’t make any sense… that destroys the journey,’” he said, adding, “They fought me, they sent me letters about it and everything, and I just stuck to my guns. Luckily for me, Ridley, even though he would have loved to write a sex scene with me and Connie Nielsen, he agreed with me back then, and that that was the moral core of the film.”
Calling Gladiator “really old-fashioned” and noting that the studio didn’t really understand why they were shooting for that vibe, Crowe felt his pushback was justified after seeing so many women turn out for the movie upon its release. He also voiced his opinion that Scott’s underwhelming sequel, Gladiator II, “destroyed” the first film’s moral center.
“On the surface, Gladiator is a movie for men, but if it was a movie for men, it would be about revenge,” Crowe explained. “But it’s not about revenge. It’s a movie for women because it’s about vengeance, and this is a subtle difference, but it is a difference. I needed the character to stay on that track. So for them, in a second movie to destroy that moral center, it’s very interesting because the second movie barely took the same box office that the first movie took but that’s 20 years later, and when you apply how much of a change there’s been on the value of a dollar, they failed, and they failed because they didn’t understand why it was successful, because it had a moral core.”
In the decades since its release, Gladiator has arguably proven to be popular with people in general (at least those unconcerned with historical inaccuracies) often ranking highly on lists of the greatest movies ever made.
The post Gladiator Is a Movie for Women, Argues Russell Crowe appeared first on Den of Geek.
