Rome must fall in the first Gladiator II trailer

After 24 years, Ridley Scott is back with a follow-up to Gladiator, and the sequel’s new trailer promises bread, circuses, and buckets of blood.

Set decades after the events of the first film, Gladiator II will tell a new legend about how a now-grown Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal) becomes an enslaved gladiator, despite his being the Roman empire’s former heir. Though Lucius can vividly recall some moments from his childhood, his memories of his mother Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) seem to have faded by the time he’s crossed paths with power broker Macrinus (Denzel Washington).

As a man who deals in weapons and warriors, Macrinus can see great potential in Lucius as he watches him take on a rhino in the Coliseum. But as skilled as Lucius is at killing animals, what he truly wants is to take down Rome itself — or at least its new leaders, Emperor Geta (Joseph Quinn), Emperor Caracalla (Fred Hechinger), and General Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal).

Between the sand-throwing, roaring crowds, and knock-down, drag-out battles, the trailer makes Gladiator II look like exactly what fans of the first film have been yearning for. And it’s going to be very interesting to see the movie duke it out for box-office supremacy against Wicked when Gladiator II hits theaters on November 22nd.