Gladiator Knew What The Odyssey Forgot
Twenty-five years apart, Hollywood makes the same mistake.
I liked Gladiator when it debuted in May 2000. After watching it again Saturday afternoon last month, I changed my mind.
It’s Citizen Kane compared to Hollywood 2026.
Today’s Hollywood either doesn’t know how to make a hero's epic anymore or doesn’t want to. The evidence? Gladiator II and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.
Twenty-five years apart, Hollywood makes the same error.
Must every Hollywood hero be conflicted and guilt-ridden in 2026? Does he need wounds and flaws to prove the story is serious? This mechanism works for some films, but not all.
We see modern culture’s belief system at work in Hollywood, but it didn’t start with Christopher Nolan.
Gladiator II: Double the Money and Half the Heart
Russell Crowe blasted Gladiator II when it hit theaters. He said the sequel kept the action and the scale of Gladiator but dumped the values holding the whole thing together. Audiences noticed.
I didn’t watch Gladiator II. I knew Hollywood couldn’t produce a competent hero’s epic to save its life. I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
But, you say, Gladiator II earned $460 million worldwide, almost matching the original’s $465 million!
Right, but two problems.
Gladiator cost just $103 million. Gladiator II burned $250 million to make the same money, more than double the cost for the same ROI.
And adjusted for inflation, the original’s gross is almost $830 million in today’s dollars. Twenty years of goodwill and a much bigger budget still couldn’t make Gladiator II a winner.
Gladiator had other things going for it too. Ridley Scott's direction, Russell Crowe at his peak, a genre nobody had touched in decades. The sequel kept Scott and inherited a devoted fan base built over twenty years.
It just didn’t have Crowe, and it didn’t need to. What it needed was an ending that delivered the same emotional payoff.
Hollywood often assumes audiences come back for bigger battles and better effects. More often, they come back to feel what the first story made them feel. Gladiator understood that.
Maximus loses it all, earns his revenge, and dies at peace. His journey reaches its logical end. The sequel, judging by the reaction from fans and critics alike, never found an ending with the same punch.
You can replace an actor. You can spend twice as much on spectacle. But if the emotional resolution evaporates, so does the reason people cared in the first place.
Ever seen a sequel that kept the scale of the original but lost its soul?
That’s Gladiator II.
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Then Hollywood Struck Again, to an Ancient Greek Hero
Classicists and critics who have seen The Odyssey describe an ending where Odysseus goes into exile, weighed down by guilt. This is a punishment Homer’s own Odysseus never faced.
Homer’s own audience wouldn’t know what the hell is going on.
Even Emily Wilson, the classicist whose translation Nolan has cited as an influence, has mixed feelings.
She’s glad the film brought new attention to Homer. But she’s said it misses essential themes. Wilson claims it trades the Homeric ideal of heroic glory for a modern psychological lens instead.
I’ve written before about how that guilt damages Homer’s story. Homer’s Odysseus brags about the Trojan Horse as proof a god favors him.
Nolan’s version reportedly treats it as a wound he has to confess. We have a different studio, a different century of source material, and the same faulty fix applied: give the hero guilt he never earned.
Then pretend it’s deep and meaningful.
Note to Hollywood: Original Gladiator Is Streaming on Hulu
Maximus kills. Maximus wins. Maximus dies satisfied, having settled every score.
The audience cheered and threw fistfuls of money at everyone involved.
No guilt spiral required about the piles of bodies.
The film snagged five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor, and a quarter century later it still boasts an 87% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes with 250,000 ratings. People don’t just remember Gladiator fondly. They still watch it and still love it, right now, on Hulu.
Hollywood keeps acting like it doesn’t know whether audiences will accept a clean-winning hero. The answer’s been streaming for over 10 years.
Ask yourself: did you ask for the guilt-ridden version of anything, or did it just start arriving that way from Hollywood?
Guilt: Hollywood’s Go-To for Depth
In the mid-2000s, prestige television and Nolan’s own Batman films trained a generation of writers and executives that moral complexity equals seriousness.
The Sopranos and Breaking Bad turned slow moral corrosion into the smartest thing on TV, and Nolan’s Batman brought the conflicted hero to the big screen.
By the 2010s, giving a hero guilt had become the default for anyone who wanted their film to be considered ‘art.’
Tell Marvel, would you?
The Avengers made $1.5 billion worldwide in 2012, the same year The Dark Knight Rises ended Nolan’s brooding, guilt-soaked Batman trilogy. Iron Man, Captain America, Thor: none of them needed therapy to be worth rooting for.
By the end of the 2010s, the MCU had crossed $10 billion. Nolan’s own Batman trilogy, running the same years and drawing raves for its complexity, never touched that number. Two genres, one of them running through Nolan’s own decade, made different nine-figure bets.
The clean-hero bet won audiences’ hearts.
Kleos Built Odysseus. Guilt Built Walter White
The real filmmaking error is borrowing one genre’s engine to run a different genre’s story. Antihero psychology exists to tell a story about a man’s slow moral collapse.
A Homeric epic runs on kleos, on glory, on proving yourself against gods and fate. These are not the same operating system, and audiences have always known the difference, even when Hollywood forgets it.
The Odyssey wasn't written once and locked in place in 800 BC. It was performed and reshaped by generations of bards, at festivals, in front of live audiences, for centuries before anyone wrote it down.
The Trojan Horse itself shows up on pottery from the 7th century BC, proof that this story was already old before Homer's version became the one that stuck.
What survived that process is what ancient audiences kept choosing to hear again.
Kleos and glory won out, generation after generation, because that’s what the ancient Greeks wanted from their heroes.
Running the Breaking Bad routine on a story that ancient audiences already field-tested for hundreds of years is a strange choice.
You rewatch endings that made you feel something, not endings where the hero worked through his guilt.
Gladiator has stood the test of time. Will The Odyssey?
Hollywood forgot what epic heroes are for. The answer has been on Hulu for years.
I’m not worried about the story. Twenty-five years hasn’t dulled it. I'm more concerned about the studio executives greenlighting these scripts.
This is why Past Passport exists. Every generation thinks the old stories stopped working. They didn’t. Someone just needs to remember how to tell them.
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I felt the same way and feel the same way about many contemporary epics. Take Dune II for another example.
The ending of the book (and the narratively superior SyFi miniseries version which proved the story could be faithfully told in all the ways the Dune II writers used to justify refusing to) had a fully-awakened Paul threaten to destroy the lifecycle of the sandworms permanently (using “changed waters” and a knowledge of the ecology of Arrakis earned from living in it among its native people) if he was not obeyed.
The spacing guild saw the threat as “no more spice ever again” and proceeded to cart the armies of all the great houses assembled in orbit home whether they liked it or not.
Paul wins a (compared to a galactic war) bloodless victory and claims the birthright he had been wrongfully deprived of by the Baron and the Emperor’s scheme to wipe out a popular and powerful great house.
In the film version we got, awakened Paul, who could see the future and choose among its possible paths, chose to threaten to “nuke the spice fields” which would in fact disrupt production for as long as it took for new ones to be formed by the worms, who would be underground and unharmed in any meaningful way by the blast or its fallout.
So instead of winning with cunning and claiming what was his back from his enemies—he instead becomes an embattled usurper whose first and greatest threat was simply ignored.
Why?
I suspect a similar aversion to endings in which a story’s hero wins unqualified victories because of their virtues rather than qualified ones because of their vices.
It strikes me as if people who have the power to do so are living out a beef with the idea of heroism. This strikes me as civilizationally dangerous given the cultural importance of the idea that one person ever ought to stand against the status quo for the greater good. This seems like the idea objected to when you look at one “hero” after another be negated in “modern” retellings of their stories. This to me appears evident in most modern so-called heroic epics.
I wonder what we are risking by making the idea that one virtuous person standing against the world can make a positive difference. And I wonder what we will lose of ourselves if we persist in it.