Gladiator: What if Ridley Scott set the bar too high?

The 1950s was an authentic golden age for the peplum genre, specifically the biblical peplum: Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments or Quo Wadi to name just a few. In the 1960s, the peplum wave – a genre called Sword and sandals In the United States – continued with some success, but much less than during the past decade.

And there were two resounding box office failures that sealed his fate: The Pharaoh’s Cleopatra with its chaotic production and Elizabeth Taylor’s Whims. And The Fall of the Roman Empire, directed by Anthony Mann, was released a year later in 1964.

The film depicts the internal struggle between the unstable tyrant Commodus and the general Livius, a worthy disciple of Marcus Aurelius, who wants a Roman Empire resistant to poverty and barbarian invasions. Does the story remind you of anything? And yes, a certain gladiator by Ridley Scott.

And for good reason: it’s almost a remake in disguise, right down to its cutscenes. Like most productions of this scale, Mann’s film was expensive at the time: $19 million. This is equivalent to 189 million dollars today. It grossed less than $5 million at the box office. The financial disaster of the fall of the Roman Empire caused his production company to go into liquidation in June 1964.

aren’t you having fun

36 years later, the slave defying the empire, in the form of Russell Crowe, not only revives a genre abandoned by Hollywood for decades, but also relaunches his career. Ridley ScottIt was seriously burdened by a series of major commercial failures in the 90s. Neither 1492: Christopher Columbus (1992), nor Lame de Von (1996) nor On Equal Terms (1997) received favor from critics and the public. along with GladiatorScott plays everything.

A game of chance and a huge risk that will be a winner. Gladiator has earned $465 million at the international box office, which translates to over $850 million adjusted for inflation. In addition, collecting five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Russell Crowe.

So, a full box set that will logically whet the appetite of Hollywood producers and studios, all too happy to see a new disruption that they can rush into. The trouble is that almost every performance in the following years went into a downward spiral…

Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy from 2004 certainly did well with $497 million at the box office, but how many people died on the field of honor? Clash of the Titans, a remake of the 1981 classic, made it possible to begin work on a sequel, but it was a colossal failure, grossing $150 million less at the box office than its predecessor had released three years earlier.

Stop your tank!

Who still remembers Pompeii? Gods of Egypt fiasco? Hercules and The Legend of Hercules (released in the same year!!!)? Noah, delivered by Darren Aronofsky in 2014, a colossal failure? An infinitely more modest resurrection of Christ signed by Kevin Reynolds in 2016? The abject failure of Oliver Stone’s Alexander , made for $155 million (minus marketing costs, always…) that even a remake can’t save? Ridley Scott himself was not immune to this carnage. His Exodus: Gods & Kings, starring Christian Bale as Moses, was a dismal failure, not even $270 million under his belt.

Hit by an obscure remake (sorry, new adaptation…) Ben-HurReleased in 2016 and signed by Timur Bekmambetov. Although the director and the MGM studio defended themselves by saying that this version was a new adaptation of the literary work published in 1880, no one believed it.

How would you imagine following William Wyler’s absolute masterpiece, which went down in film history in 1959 with 11 Oscars, not to mention his prowess? Jack Huston’s (new) tank logically hit a wall, ending his theatrical career at a humiliating $94 million. The making of such a film was entrusted to the director of Abraham Lincoln, the vampire hunter, who was still holding a stick to beat and embark on a suicide venture…

From swords and sandals to heroic fantasy

But there is another element of explanation that comes down to one name: Peter Jackson. With the huge success of his epic Lord of the Rings saga, the public turned away Sword and sandals give preference sword and sorcery andheroic fantasy. Helped a lot, though, by Jackson’s extraordinary sense of direction and incredible special effects produced by the company WETA.

Without Lord of the Rings, there would never be Game of Thrones. And the number of other movies and TV series that get in the way. It’s no coincidence that Amazon put a billion dollars on the table to produce its own series based on the world created by JRR Tolkien.

The result of all this is that the rise of the fantasy genre and the extension of the technological advances widely used in superhero films have resulted in the peplum genre becoming increasingly ostracized from a market saturated by blockbusters with colossal production envelopes.

Unable to capture the public’s imagination the way it has in the past, the genre feels outdated. Especially since in the United States, confusion of genres reigns. “In the modern American imagination, antiquity is obscured, closer to fanciful heroic fantasy.”, Film historian Laurent Aknin explained.

Resurrection 2.0

24 years after Gladiator, Ridley Scott is back with a sequel. The strange sensation of reliving the same cycle. Burned by a series of painful commercial failures with a pharaonic budget (House of Gucci, The Last Duel, Napoleon), the filmmaker is trying to get back in the saddle. Initial feedback on this Gladiator II is pretty good.

Will Scott regain his prosperity thanks to her? “This is the best movie I’ve ever made!” He said some time ago, seeming to be sure of himself. And it will definitely have to work, considering its budget, which has increased significantly to $310 million. Verdict November 13th… on the way to a new peplum resurrection? or a new eulogy.