Gladiator 2: What Are its Chances of Profitability?

The release of a new trailer for Gladiator 2 has, of course, caused a spike in chatter about the film--overwhelmingly enthusiastic, to go by what I have seen. The critical and commercial failure that was Ridley Scott's prior historical epic, Napoleon (and the fact that Napoleon's failure has been the norm for Scott's epics) seems utterly absent from the dialogue as instead the commentators, befitting their function as les claqueurs, fixate on Scott's one real "win" in the form with 2000's Gladiator--while overlooking any problems with the concept of a follow-up, which seem quite evident in the trailer they are celebrating. The movie, a sequel to a movie where both the hero and the villain died, and which presumably made what followed an "alternate history" given its extreme remoteness from the facts (the Roman Republic restored!), looks less like follow-up than do-over of the first, scaled-up and disguised as a sequel, with (per usual for Scott) the spectacle coming in far, far ahead of anything else for all the melodramatic implications of the bits of dialogue, the blaring music.

In fairness I think more people will show up for this one than did for Scott's "vision" of Napoleon as Arthur Fleck in period costume. But will enough of them show to justify the colossal expenditure on this movie?

As might be expected these days amid pandemic, inflation, elevated interest rates, strikes and much else Gladiator 2 is a movie that was massively budgeted to begin with and then went way overbudget--its cost of production nearly doubling from the original $165 million to the $310 million spent. We are told by journalists claiming access to "insiders" that the "net" cost of production was actually $250 million, but even if true (and the studios have been known to underreport costs here) that is still quite a bit of money--and just part of the total final bill. After all, counting promotion and distribution and other such expenses the ultimate outlay for a movie comes to two to three times the cost of production (certainly when we take into account post-theatrical promotion and distribution for home viewing, etc.). Working with the $250-$310 million range, this works out to somewhere between $500 million and $900 million or so.

Given the limits of post-theatrical earnings at least 60 percent of that will have to be made from ticket sales--which is to say, $300 to $550 million. Given that the studio typically keeps a bit less than half of the proceeds from the ticket sales one would have to picture a gross double that--somewhere between $600 million and $1.1 billion grossed just to get the production past break-even.

As it happened the first Gladiator made $460 million back in 2000--which works out to about $840 million in today's terms, or the mid-point of that range. That in itself is cause for concern, as it means the movie can do as well, or better than, its hugely successful predecessor, and still lose money. Exacerbating the problem is that such money is not so easily made now as it was just a few years ago, with sequels offering splashy spectacle in particular a tougher sell than before--and this specific movie a particularly unnecessary-looking sequel that, because of the plot of the first film, does not have the original's stars, appearing almost a quarter of a century after that first film. I do not think the public's interest can be taken for granted, while interest among the younger cohort, for which period pieces are a particularly tough sell, will be something to watch closely, along with the matter of just how spendthrift the film's backers and makers have been. My gut reaction is that if all it takes to get into the territory of profitability is $600 million (almost a third less than what the original made) this movie may have a tough time achieving that, but that it would be doable. By contrast the billion dollar, let alone the $1.1 billion, mark (far above the original's gross, and perhaps more than any movie may make this year according to at least one analyst) seems like a real longshot.