It’s not easy being a box office success, critical darling, awards season juggernaut, game-changer, and trailblazer all at once, but it can’t be argued that Ridley Scott’s Gladiator managed to do all of the above and more with aplomb.
$460 million at the box office and five Academy Award wins from a dozen nominations including Best Picture and Best Actor was only the beginning of its legacy, although things never got any better than they did when Russell Crowe’s Maximus cut a swathe through his enemies on a quest for revenge.
Thanks entirely to Gladiator, blockbuster historical epics were back in fashion in a major way, with countless spiritual successors emerging for well over a decade and counting. However, how many of them managed to earn more money from theaters? The answer is just one, with Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy the sole outlier.
In fact, the boom for epic period pieces produced a lot more misses than it did hits, with John Lee Hancock’s The Alamo and Oliver Stone’s Alexander going down as two of the heftiest flops of all-time, while not even Scott could repeat his own magic after he was forced to watch Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood, Exodus: Gods and Kings, and The Last Duel all fail to catch fire with paying customers.
It was a bandwagon that everybody jumped on simply to fall off, but the progenitor has clearly maintained its staying power after FlixPatrol revealed Gladiator to be one of iTunes’ most popular titles, proving once and for all that the original is more than likely always going to reign supreme as the best.
