Gladiator II spoilers: Ridley Scott appears to have dropped a major bomb about the ending of epic sequel

SPOILER ALERT

Oh, Ridley Scott.

The British filmmaker is famously loose and unfiltered in interviews so perhaps it’s not that surprising that he dropped what seemed to be a whopper of a spoiler for his upcoming Gladiator sequel.

Scott told Total Film ahead of Gladiator II’s November 14 release that he was already working on the script on the next instalment. “I’ve already got eight pages,” he said. “I’ve got the beginning of a very good footprint.

“If there’s a Gladiator III, I don’t think you’d ever go back into the arena, but I had to go back into the arena.”

That seems to be steps further than when he recently told French magazine Premiere he was “toying” with a further sequel. They’re not the most revealing comments though.

What he also told Premiere is what potentially gives away the ending of the yet-to-be-released movie starring Paul Mescal as Lucius, the son of Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla, who returns to Rome and enters the gladiatorial contests.

CONSIDER THIS YOUR FINAL SPOILER WARNING

“The ending of Gladiator II is reminiscent of The Godfather, with Michael Corleone finding himself a job he didn’t want, and wondering, ‘Now, Father, what do I do?’. So the next (Gladiator film) will be about a man who doesn’t want to be where he is.”

While there’s always the chance that “the man” in question is not Lucius and that the “job he didn’t want” is not the Emperor of Rome, but it’s hard to interpret that comment another way.

In the original film starring Russell Crowe as Maximus, it was implied but not confirmed that Lucius is the son of the downed warrior. The second Gladiator II trailer released two weeks ago settles that debate as Lucilla tells Lucius that his father’s name was Maximus.

Lucius was a child in the 2000 film, portrayed then by Spencer Treat Clark, and in the canon of the story, the character was sent away from Rome to protect him. In between the two movies, he (Mescal) has made a life for himself in the African province of Numidia with a wife and child when conquering Roman forces ransack the city.

Lucius returns to Rome as a prisoner and falls into the “ownership” of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former slave with grand ambitions for a power grab.

The young man is bent on revenge and channels that bloodlust and rage into victories in the arena. But what he really wants is to take down the empire, including Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), the general who led the charge at Numidia.

In a “making of” clip released overnight, Nielsen tells the video that the past 20 years of Rome has been a time of chaos with power-mad leaders on the throne.

The promotion has emphasised the epic nature of the swords-and-sandals movie, with Washington calling it “the biggest film I’ve ever been on, it’s Cecil B. DeMille on steroids”.