Russell Crowe has suggested Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II failed to ignite audiences in the same way as the original film because it lacked a “moral core”.

He recalled how he had pushed back against studio moves to give his Gladiator character Maximus sex scenes back in 2000, in his belief that it would not chime with a man grieving the death of his wife.

“I just kept pushing back,” he recounted. “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’.”

“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.”

“We were shooting for something really, really old fashioned and the studio kind of, at the time, didn’t quite understand why,” he continued.

Crowe said he had been vindicated by the fact that when the film came out there were more women in theatres than men.  

“On the surface, Gladiator is a movie for men but if it was a movie for men, it would be about revenge. 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,” he said.

“So for them, in a second movie to destroy that moral centre, 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.”

Crowe was speaking at the Taormina Film Festival where he will receive an International Achievement Award on Saturday evening ahead of the world premiere of Derrick Borte’s action thriller Bear Country.

The film stars Crowe as an ageing club owner whose dreams of selling-up and retiring are scuppered when an masked robber cleans out the business. With cartel bosses breathing down his neck and a young upstart eager to purchase the club he needs to act fast.

Crowe previously worked with Borte on the 2020 road rage thriller Unhinged.

Co-stars Nina Dobrev and Aaron Paul have joined Crowe and Borte at the festival, with producers Mark Fasano and Jeffrey Greenstein also in town.

The open air screening for some 4,500 spectators will kick-off a summer preview tour across Italy for the film ahead of an August 26 release by 01 Distribution on behalf of Minerva Pictures with Rai Cinema.

Bear Country is among five upcoming titles for Crowe which also include Cold War thriller The Billion Dollar Spy, Unabom and Highlander which are in post-production as well as The Last Druid which begins shooting June.