For all those who consider football to be the pinnacle of weekend entertainment, Gladiator II-Paddington 3 sounds beguilingly like a shock away win, perhaps secured after a hairy last-minute goalmouth scramble.
But movie enthusiasts know better. For them, Sir Ridley Scott’s Gladiator sequel, which comes out today, and Paddington In Peru – the third in the franchise – released a week ago across the UK, represent a double-dose of multiplex magic.
Where once there was ‘Barbenheimer’, shorthand for the 2023 films Barbie and Oppenheimer that together puffed welcome new life back into the ailing cinema industry, now there is ‘Gladdington’. Or ‘Paddiator’, if you prefer it to seem like a cheeky reference to Gladiator’s leading man Paul Mescal, the former Gaelic footballer from County Kildare.
Barbenheimer, by any measure, was a cultural phenomenon. The two films came out on the same seismic day, July 21 last year, and over the ensuing couple of months pumped a remarkable £140 million into the UK box office.
That took the year’s cinema takings over £1 billion, nudging the figure back towards pre-pandemic levels.
Barbie, Greta Gerwig’s satire about the Mattel fashion doll played by Margot Robbie, with Ryan Gosling as Ken, was the more successful of the pair, comfortably the year’s number one film and a huge global hit.
But Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-festooned Oppenheimer did thunderously good business too. Telling the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, it set a formidable new record for a biopic of a theoretical physicist.
And, actually, that’s not as glib as it sounds because even in the past 10 years there’s been another one – 2014’s The Theory Of Everything, about the life of Stephen Hawking, played by Eddie Redmayne.
Sir Ridley Scott’s Gladiator sequel, which comes out today, and Paddington In Peru – the third in the franchise – released a week ago across the UK, represent a double-dose of multiplex magic
Now there is ‘Gladdington’. Or ‘Paddiator’, if you prefer it to seem like a cheeky reference to Gladiator’s leading man Paul Mescal
As two wildly contrasting and hugely enjoyable pictures coming out in close proximity and both well worth going to see in the cinema, Gladdington is indeed this year’s Barbenheimer
Barbenheimer changed the cinematic landscape, because never before had two such different films been so closely entwined (even if both, in their way, celebrated a complex icon of 20th century history).
‘The Barbenheimer hashtag wasn’t planned, there was no strategy by the industry, no masterplan,’ says James Connor of the UK Cinema Association. ‘Social media had a lot to do with it. That created incredible momentum and I think the longevity of both films surprised everyone.’
The two films that make up Gladdington were also initially scheduled to come out on the same day.
As yet there are no cast members urging audiences to see both movies back-to-back, as the Barbie and Oppenheimer actors did. Paddington himself has been notably reticent on the subject.
Nor are people yet going out in their droves wearing Gladdington outfits, which is a shame, because the chest armour and sword would be topped off nicely by a floppy red hat.
Barbenheimer costumes on the other hand were everywhere, and while they swung very much towards Barbie, some referred creatively to both films. For example, one T-shirt displayed Oppenheimer’s famously dark quotation, lifted from a sacred Hindu text – ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’ – picked out in bubblegum-pink lettering.
Nonetheless, as two wildly contrasting and hugely enjoyable pictures coming out in close proximity and both well worth going to see in the cinema, Gladdington is indeed this year’s Barbenheimer.
While neither film is quite as good as its predecessor (the 2000 sword-and-sandals classic Gladiator starring Russell Crowe as mighty Maximus, and 2017’s glorious Paddington 2) as the Mail’s film critic, I still unhesitatingly anointed each of the new releases with four stars.
Paddington In Peru loses a little of the gentle charm of the first two Paddington pictures by venturing so far from 32 Windsor Gardens, the London home our duffel-coated ursine hero shares with the Brown family.
While neither film is quite as good as its predecessor, I still unhesitatingly anointed each of the new releases with four stars
As for Gladiator II, it’s an old-fashioned epic with cracking battle scenes and a narrative that might have been cloned from the original film
The film is appealingly bonkers, with Scott holding firm to his oft-stated belief that in historical blockbusters
But the search up and down the Amazon for his missing Aunt Lucy is still tremendous fun, with memorably silly turns from Antonio Banderas as a gold-crazed riverboat captain and Olivia Colman as a suspiciously friendly Mother Superior. It’s a sticky marmalade sandwich of a movie: a bit messy but still satisfying.
As for Gladiator II, it’s an old-fashioned epic with cracking battle scenes and a narrative that might have been cloned from the original film as Mescal follows the advice that all combatants in the Colosseum should heed: when in Rome, do as Russell Crowe did. It’s what you might call the Maximus maxim.
The film is appealingly bonkers, with Scott holding firm to his oft-stated belief that in historical blockbusters, history doesn’t especially matter. When his movie Napoleon was lambasted this time last year for taking mighty liberties with the facts, for instance by having French troops fire cannonballs at the Pyramids, the veteran director had a ready response. ‘I don’t know if he did that, but it was a fast way of saying he took Egypt,’ he said, adding: ‘When I have issues with historians, I ask: “Excuse me mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the **** up, then.” ’
Gladiator II proudly bears Scott’s ‘Excuse me mate, were you there?’ imprint, with one tough guy riding an armoured rhinoceros and killer sharks circling round the flooded Colosseum during the re-creation of a naval battle. Also, several characters are somehow able to address tens of thousands of spectators just by, erm, shouting.
As I watched those scenes I pictured the late Geoffrey Rickman, my illustrious ancient history professor at university, having a celestial dose of apoplexy. But, sorry Professor Rickman, in a way Scott is absolutely right. What we want above all from a trip to the cinema is not accurate period detail but top-notch escapism.
Gladdington provides it in spades, and if, like Barbenheimer, it encourages people back to what in the old days we called the flicks, then three cheers.
Because no matter how convenient it is to watch films at home on those ever-proliferating streaming platforms, nothing can replace the joy of the collective experience: sitting with others in front of a big cinema screen, ideally eating Revels (though I’ll grudgingly accept that some folk have other snacking ideas).
Moreover, as the people at the UK Cinema Association are quick to point out, there is a really strong slate of family films scheduled to come out over the next few weeks, including Moana 2, the Wizard Of Oz prequel Wicked, and Mufasa: The Lion King.
Admittedly, Gladiator II, certificate 15, is not what you’d call a family film. It contains plenty of violence and gore. Yet, with Inside Out 2 already leading this year’s UK box-office figures, and Despicable Me 4 not far behind, it seems clear that family films are the future of cinema.
Which is no great surprise, because they are also the past. My earliest memory of going to the pictures dates from 1969, when my mum took me to the Palace in Southport to see a double-bill of the wholesome weepie Ring Of Bright Water and the silent slapstick classic The Plank.
Paddington In Peru loses a little of the gentle charm of the first two Paddington pictures by venturing so far from 32 Windsor Gardens
But the search up and down the Amazon for his missing Aunt Lucy is still tremendous fun
It’s a sticky marmalade sandwich of a movie: a bit messy but still satisfying
I can still vividly recall how the hilarity of watching Tommy Cooper and Eric Sykes pratfalling around with a floorboard was compounded by the almost indescribable agony of seeing Mij the otter get the chop at the end of Ring Of Bright Water. We cried buckets and then laughed like drains.
Similarly, my own three children, all grown up now, have intense memories not of gathering in front of the telly, but of being taken to our local Odeon.
Emotively for them, and even more so for their mother and me, Pixar’s brilliant Toy Story films followed almost exactly the same trajectory as their own lives.
The original came out in 1995, the year our second child was born, while Toy Story 3, the one in which Andy goes to college and his mother gives away Woody, Buzz Lightyear and the rest of the crew, coincided with our firstborn leaving home. Seeing them together in the cinema was a family ritual. I’m welling up now, just thinking about it. Those childhood cinema-going experiences are incredibly precious for every generation. A friend of mine, a decade older than me, still talks evocatively about the Saturday morning kids’ club in the late 1950s at the Angel Cinema in Islington, north London.
Admission cost sixpence and before Woody Woodpecker or Flash Gordon started, everyone would have to sing the club song. My pal still remembers every cheesy word: ‘We come along on a Saturday morning greeting everybody with a smile/We come along on a Saturday morning, knowing it’s well worthwhile’ – not least because ‘if you weren’t joining in there was this little usher, a Welshman, who used to whack you with his torch’.
So not everything has changed for the worse, yet it is that kind of affectionate nostalgia that Gladdington, and all the other films that tempt families back to the pictures, will create for future generations.
Sometimes, cinema itself bows a sentimental head to those memories, for instance in Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical charmer The Fabelmans (2022), or in another 2022 release, Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, in which the main character and his family are transported when watching the flying car in the joyful, if at times terrifying, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
That classic 1968 children’s film also has a special place in my wife Jane’s heart as, like me with my Southport double-bill, she vividly recalls being taken as a little girl to see it at the ABC in Barnsley.
Some 55 years later she went to see her ageing parents, still living in the house she grew up in. By then her mother was showing clear signs of dementia, but derived childlike glee from watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on TV. She lay on the sofa with Jane holding her, to make sure she didn’t fall off, and they sang all the songs together.
That was Jane’s last positive image of her beloved mum. A few days later she suffered a massive stroke and died soon afterwards.
It is the cinema that sows memories like that. So while there are plenty of reasons not to go, from home-streaming to rising admission prices, at least one of them – the complaint that there’s nothing worth seeing – is entirely confounded by the likes of Gladdington.
So go and see it this weekend, and cherish the sight of Paul Mescal giving his enemies a hard stare.
