“People Want Heroes” - Russell Crowe Breaks Down Gladiator II FAILURE

**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
I'm not giving up. I am selling the building.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:06)
The final season of FX is the bear. The restaurant is flooded.

**Russell Crowe** (0:13)
Everything's either gonna be okay...

**SPEAKER_3** (0:15)
No!

**Patrick Bet-David** (0:15)
Stop! Or not.

**Russell Crowe** (0:18)
We are outgunned and we are outmanned, but we have each other.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:24)
FX is the Bear, the final season. All episodes now streaming on Disney+.

**Patrick Bet-David** (0:29)
Gladiator 1, I watch it from 43 minutes on. Every quarter, I have to watch that movie. There's something very special about that movie. Gladiator 2 comes out horrible. I sat through it. It's just too much. It breaks my heart because Denzel was in it, and I'm supportive of anything that Denzel does. But here's what Russell Crowe had to say about Gladiator 2, which by the way, he wasn't even in it. Nothing.
There was nothing. Can you imagine the emotional, the way it ends, the scene? Show your face, Gladiator. He turns around. How dare you turn your back against me, Gladiator. Turns around. Who are you? And it's, you know, the famous line that he says, you know which ones I'm talking about.
Here is Russell Crowe talking about Gladiator 2 Go for it.

**Russell Crowe** (1:13)
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. Doesn't make any sense because then that destroys the journey. And they fought me and they, like, you know, sent me.
And I just stuck to my guns. And luckily for me, Ridley, even though he would have loved to have had sex with me, Connie Nilsen.
He agreed with me back then that that was the moral core of the film. So for them, the second movie, to destroy that moral center. 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. It was successful because it had a moral core.

**Patrick Bet-David** (2:30)
It's getting choked up.

**Russell Crowe** (2:41)
They gotta love something and keep it with them forever. In the way that that has been tonight. Anyway, I'll be able to find you somewhere in the world. That film, 26 years later, is on primetime television. And it's available on streaming service. Why?
Because the love for that thing is because of its moral core.

**Patrick Bet-David** (3:02)
You can pause it right there. What a freaking powerful breakdown, Ilan.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:07)
Well, I mean, look at how when you talked about Gladiator, the emotional connection you have to it. And that's what he's touching on. He's touching on something much deeper than the film. He's touching on a directionality of things in general, which is as much as Hollywood may try and engineer films that push a certain narrative or foundational beliefs or desire tend to come back to these ancient archetypes that are repeated throughout all of history over and over and over. And that's why he's emotional about it, because he created something that connects to that. And people don't want to watch a movie where someone's fighting. They want to watch a movie where someone is fighting for something. And if you corrupt it, then they're not only not going to be interested, they're going to be offended by it. And no matter what people try and do to us, look at the heroes that we still put in Marvel films. Look at these movies that still do extremely well.

**Alon** (3:50)
They are even anti-heroes.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:52)
Yes, they have to stand for something and that thing can never be corrupted, because once it is, they stand for nothing. And part of us is always seeking that, especially men. Men nowadays are seeking for purpose, identity, value. And we look to films as our archetypes for how we're going to feel about those things. So Gladiator and these older Hollywood films really did touch on that.

**Patrick Bet-David** (4:12)
I tell you, I don't normally say this. This is very hard for me to say this. Gladiator 2 is one of the worst movies I've seen in my life.
It's horrible. That's how bad it is. And the reason why it's horrible, if there was never a Gladiator 1, maybe I would have ranked it higher. But because there was a Gladiator 1, and Gladiator 1, exactly the way he put it together, was about a moral compass of a man protecting his wife and his kids and his family, that pride, and you take me from that level of tension to just how sloppy the second one was, it is so disappointing to see. I'm so glad he broke it down, because the entire time I'm sitting there wondering, what does Russell think about this movie? All I thought about is, what does Russell Crowe think about Gladiator 2? That's all I kept asking myself. It was that horrible of a movie.