Ridley Scott Blamed Paul Mescal For Gladiator 2 Failure, Dumped Him From Dog Stars

Under the category of old man on yard yelling at clouds, time to talk about Ridley Scott. Of course, coming off of the absolute burning in flames flop of Dog Stars, which apparently cost well north of a hundred million dollars to make and made eight million dollars. I want you to wrap your heads around this. Coyote versus Acme made twice as much money on its opening weekend as Dog Stars did. But anyway, coming hot off the heels of that abject failure. And again, remember, lest you misunderstand me, I think Ridley Scott is a preem first ballad hall of famer amongst Valhalla of the great directors of all time. That I believe he can make 50 terrible movies in a row if he wants. Doesn't change the fact that he's one of the greatest and his place is secure. That being said, he sucked for the last 20 years other than The Martian. Now, one of the films that I thought was a real big disappointment was Gladiator 2. Not his worst film by any stretch, but certainly one of the ones that wasn't so very good. And now Ridley Scott has decided to come out with a theory about why. And it's not his fault. He wants you to know it's not his fault. Nope. It's his. It was his star, Paul Mescal. It was Paul Mescal's fault that the Gladiator 2 lost money. Here's what they wrote over the folks at Screen Rant. Said the month Gladiator 2 debuted, Paul Mescal was announced as the lead of Scott's new post-apocalyptic movie, The Dog Stars. However, two months later, Mescal dropped out and was replaced by Jacob Elordi. It was announced that this was due to scheduling conflicts with the upcoming Beatles biopics, which I'm very excited about not watching, in which Mescal plays Paul McCartney. But a new report from Puck suggests that a different version of events. Their sources allege that Ridley Scott said Mescal, quote unquote, wasn't masculine enough for Gladiator 2 and he blamed him for the Gladiator 2's disappointing box office haul. So he's a low-key cuck, huh? Yeah. So look, to put this into perspective, Gladiator 2 did make over $400 million, right? The problem is it was a ridiculously expensive movie. And their targets, the general consensus was a movie that needed to make north of $600 million to break even. It lost hundreds of millions of dollars. And worse, it wasn't a good movie. Not its worst one, but not a very good movie. I find it interesting that the director of a film, who is the individual who is most responsible for the performance they get out of their actors, has decided to point at the performance of his actor and blame that actor for the poor box office performance of the movie. Now, look, to be clear, I like Paul Mescal very much. What was the name of the Shakespeare, the take on Hamlet? Hemnet? Yeah, Hemnet. Brilliant movie. And Paul Mescal is so good in it. Paul Mescal's a very good actor. But look, to be honest, from day one, I thought he was miscast for Gladiator 2. I agree. I thought he was miscast for it. I really did. But Ridley, you're the director. You had something to do with that. Casting director and him for final approval. Yep. And if you don't like the performance, if you don't think Mescal is exuding enough masculinity or whatever, that's on you. You're the director. You're the one sitting in the chair watching the performance. You are the one who's supposed to be guiding and enlisting out of the performer the performance that you want. And if you don't get it, you say, cut from the top. And then you go over to the actor and say, I want more of this. I want more of this. Now, look, can you expect a director? Like, I don't care. Steven Spielberg's not going to get an Oscar performance out of Gal Gadot, no matter how good Steven Spielberg is. You can't get blood from a stone. But I mean, we are talking about an Oscar-level actor in Paul Mescal and a legendary director. You can get the performance out of him you want. And if you didn't, that's on you. And, but here's the problem. While I agree that I thought Paul Mescal might've been miscast, the main issue with the movie wasn't Paul Mescal. It was a bad movie with terrible pacing, ridiculous tropes, predictable dialogue. It was just a bad film. Now again, not absolute garbage. It wasn't Craven the Hunter, but it was a bad, disappointing film. And that had nothing to do with Paul Mescal. Again, miscast. I agree. Yep. Miscast. It probably should have been somebody else. I didn't see him as Maximus's son. I just didn't see it. So that, that's fine. But to, to haul out the actor now and to throw them under the bus, you know, to me is, is number one, erroneous, but number two, classless. And at what point do you just stand up and say, yeah, I just didn't make a good movie. This is on me. I'm the director. Apparently never. Yeah. Apparently. Nope. It's, and it's everybody else's fault except Ridley Scott's. Um, and I dunno, I, I was very disappointed, uh, to read these comments, but again, I think, especially on top of the comments from the other day where Ridley Scott came out and said, yeah, I think I need to do another aliens movie to save it because, you know, Alien Romulus was okay. I'm sorry. He's a producer on that. Yeah. Well in name only, but I'm sorry, Ridley. It's better than anything aliens related you've made in a long time. Not ever, but in a long time since aliens to aliens. Yeah. But here's the question. Who's going to, who, what, number one, what actor is going to want to work with them now? Um, and secondly, what studio is going to want to invest money in? And then he keeps talking about making another alien film. Does he really expect, especially after dog stars that Disney's going to put up the money for him to make another alien movie? I, I just, I, I don't know. I don't know. And look, I, I recognize too that Rob, I am, we've talked about Ridley Scott a few times now in the last month or two. Yep. And I want, I understand it might start looking like one of the sub genres of my channel is being a Ridley Scott bashing channel. And believe me, I don't want to be that. I think he is one of the greatest ever. I don't want to be that. So forgive me if it sounds like I'm going down that road too much. I don't intend to, but, uh, Rob, I think this at very least, this is a bad look. Anyway, you read these comments as a producer, as a director, what's your takeaway from this? Look, you know, after the fact, I've always believed that, yeah, you can reassess and you can take stock in what you've done, but Monday morning quarterbacking, especially with collaborators of yours. And especially when you're the director, I don't think it, it behooves anyone to bash the film itself. I mean, I have no problem looking back and taking into account mistakes I've made. I mean, I think that, uh, that's part of growing up and maturing is being able to look at your work and find the shortcomings of it. If there indeed are shortcomings, I think in gladiator too, you know, there was a lot of things in it. And, and I don't necessarily disagree that Paul Muskell was a little bit miscast because you needed, he's a little quiet, you know, he's a little quieter and more introspective as a performer. He's not. I'm Maximus Desmos radius. You know, he's not like that. He's not that guy. Um, I'm looking forward to him in the Beatles movie though. But I, you know, I don't, I just, I don't think it behooves anyone, but you know what, Ridley Scott is of that age, you know, pushing 90. He doesn't give an F and, and I think that, you know, he's on a tear to make as many movies as he can while he can stay while he's able to on this, um, God's green earth. And I just wish that, you know, I think, uh, I wish he'd worked more with his longtime editor, Pietro Scalia, who's finishing all of his movies. And I think, you know, Ridley Scott makes these movies and then he kind of bails during posts. So he goes into pre-production on the next movie because he's trying to get so many movies done, but I don't think it's really served him well. I think the last movie, I mean, I think the Martian is one of his greatest, if not the Martian is so good. You know what, honestly, the more I think about the Martian, it could very well be in like my top 25 of like my all-time favorite movies. It's that good. It's so fantastic. It's so good. And like many of his movies, you know, he's got a, he's got a theatrical cut and then he has an extended cut for video. He's done that on so many of his movies. And, um, I, you know, I love the extended version of the Martian. Just cause it's got more character stuff and more of the NASA, all the people like Sean Bean and, and, um, and those, those actors. And, uh, I, I, I'm a huge fan of his. He's clearly one of the great visual, visual stylists in all of cinema, but you know, I don't, and certainly he's diverse in terms of the subject matter he's attacking. Yeah. I just wish, you know, that saying something like this is sort of unbecoming. And, um, you know, I, I feel bad. I mean, I don't think you can blame look gladiator to it, the fault of it and it didn't bomb. It was just really expensive. Well, I mean, I lost like a couple of hundred million dollars. I think when you lose a couple of hundred million dollars, it's yeah. But I mean, it, you know, it's still made like 450 million or something, but it needed to make a billion, but the gladiator was why, why make that film? You know, I mean, I think there was stuff there. I thought Denzel Washington was clearly having a great time, but the film was, I mean, gladiator is so iconic that I, I, I, what, what's the reason for doing it? I mean, someone gave him money to make the film. So what's he going to do? Say no. Well, look, I'm not, I'm not going to play Monday morning or Tuesday morning in this case, a quarterback on it. I, I was all for them taking another shot at, at another gladiator. I was all for it because if done right, it could have been spectacular, right? Yeah. But, uh, but it wasn't. So we are where we are left. Anyway, guys, question is for you. What do you think about this? Uh, Ridley Scott, who just had probably one of the most disastrous opening weekends of his career, maybe not even the worst, but one of them definitely with dog stars is Paul Miscal breathing a huge sigh of relief this month, by the way, that he did not end up being in that movie. Uh, but anyway, whatever you think about this whole story, jump down into the comment section below and let us know your thoughts.