Fresh off Christopher Nolan calling Ridley’s Scott’s “Gladiator II” his favorite film of 2024, and the fervent reactions that ensued about it, here’s Oliver Stone (“JFK”) with a very different opinion on it.
Stone was a guest on the PBD Podcast, and was asked about Scott’s sequel, which just hit the $400M worldwide mark at the box office. The filmmaker didn’t mince words when describing his disappointment towards the sequel:
It certainly watchable. It’s good, well made, but I didn’t care about the people. I wasn’t invested […] The first one was a classic. The second one is empty calories, like a commercial.
If Stone wasn’t a big fan of “Gladiator II,” he had the polar opposite reaction to Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” which he recently described as having “one stunning scene after another.”
Earlier in the week, Stone, who has recently been shopping around a potential new film, but with very little luck, claimed that he’d been blacklisted in Hollywood because of his political views, most notably due to his neutral stance on Vladimir Putin.