Best Picture Watch: New Trailer for Gladiator II

Hollywood awaits the biggest movie of the year, or one of them, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, hitting theaters November 22.

The first Gladiator won Best Picture when I started my site 25 years ago. It was on the heels of the new millennium and it, too, was an election year. George W. Bush narrowly beat Al Gore. And one year later the planes would hit the towers and America would be forever changed.

Now, here we are. Another election year. It, too, is a cliffhanger. It’s either going to be a status quo election with one party holding on for 16 of the last 20 years, or it will be the thing that party fears the most, giving over power to a person they believe is an “existential threat.”

What’s amazing about Gladiator is that we’re actually living it now. We have a public arena for shaming, and we hurl people into it almost every day. We’re a species that has a taste for blood, and try as we might to pretend otherwise, the truth finds its way out once we get enough power to live out our primal urges.

The best line in the first film was “Are you not entertained?” Like so many great films from the past, one line says everything. To really understand that line is to understand this moment we’re living through, and I don’t trust that Hollywood does. And even if they did, they’d be too afraid to say so.

Very excited to see this.