In a time when CGI regularly recreates the worlds we see on our big screens, one wouldn’t be surprised to see director Ridley Scott bringing Rome’s Colosseum to life through computer screens, but he went greatly practical instead. The filmmaker took the Gladiator II cast to Malta, Morocco and other locations during the filming of the sequel and basically recreated the Roman Empire while he was at it. But why didn’t he shoot at the real place?
After Scott made one of the biggest 2024 movies, he spoke about going back to the setting of his classic film over 20 years later. When asked why he chose to build the sets rather than shut down the famed Colosseum he said this to The Hollywood Reporter:
It’s actually cheaper.
Crazy, right? The Colosseum you see in the sequel to one of the best movies of the 2000s had the production combining digital and practical effects. And yes, they built a replica of the Colosseum. As Scott continued:
No, I went to the Colosseum with my production designer. We stood in it. We turned to each other and said, ‘It’s too small.’ My Colosseum is about 10 percent bigger because when you have a horse going full gallop, you want him to not run into a wall. So we built 50 percent real and digitally put in the rest. When you build more, there’s less bluescreen. Every time there’s blue, there’s money.
Ridley Scott recruited production designer Arthur Max, who previously did the production design for the original film with the filmmaker and won an Academy Award for it (along with other Scott movies like Black Hawk Down, Kingdom of Heaven, American Gangster, Robin Hood, Prometheus, The Martian, The Last Duel, House of Gucci and Napoleon. As Max did before, he built the Colosseum, but this time it was the size of a football field and two stories tall.
The filmmakers decided to make it larger than the actual Colosseum due to the scene in the sequel where the iconic building is filled with water for a naval battle. Per Variety, the size of the entry’s main arch was about ten feet taller than it was in the first movie in order to accommodate the ship that had to come through the Colosseum for the scene that has sparked some online controversy regarding its historical accuracy.
While we had some complaints about the story of Gladiator II, including through CinemaBlend’s review of the Gladiator sequel, it’s rather amazing to imagine all the work that went into making the sets in the movie look real not only for the audience, but also the actors there. Ridley Scott has always made it a priority to have practical effects on his sets, and the fact that Gladiator II required building sets to reenact the scale of the Roman Empire is mind-blowing!