QUESTIONS NOBODY IS ASKING: Can Gladiator II save a genre — and a studio?

The trailer for Ridley Scott’s new epic, Gladiator II, is undeniably impressive, but then it rather had to be. Rumors that its already massive budget had ballooned to as much as $310 million — which would mean it would have to be one of 2024’s highest-grossing movies just to break even, never mind making a profit — may have suggested that the film was in trouble, but an early screening of the preview at the CinemaCon convention in Las Vegas reassured exhibitors and studios alike, with the few journalists who had seen the footage rushing to extol its scale and grandeur. Now it’s been released online, and viewers have a chance to judge for themselves. (Its cinematic debut will come with Deadpool vs Wolverine.) Does it look like a worthy follow-up to Gladiator?

There will be an awful lot riding on this picture’s success. The beleaguered Paramount Pictures desperately needs a hit, and for the film to make serious money, it needs to bank Oppenheimer-level amounts. And there is something of a question mark over the now-eighty-six-year-old Scott, too, who appears in recent years to have gone for broke in emphasizing the comic aspects of everything from Napoleon’s conquest of Europe to the murder of Maurizio Gucci by his wife Patrizia.

I’m looking forward to reading reviews when the film is ready for distribution. But at least for me, Scott’s botched attempt at Napoleon last year casts a bit of a pall on the above trailer, which shares a fair amount of that same plastic-CGI look for its epic battle scenes with the previous Scott film, and the strange reaction shots and dialog readings from Denzel Washington don’t help matters.