Title: Gladiator II: A Journey Back to Rome’s Bloody Arena and the Weight of Legacy Gladiator II, directed by Ridley Scott, serves as the highly anticipated sequel to the 2000 epic. Picking up decades after Maximus’s death, the film follows Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal), the young boy from the first movie and now a grown man navigating Rome's political and moral complexities. Under the mentorship of Macrinus (Denzel Washington), a former gladiator himself, Lucius is thrust into a world where honor and survival are at odds, and he must grapple with his past, the memory of Maximus, and his sense...