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How Wicked Felled Gladiator II at the Box Office
Earlier this year, all indications pointed to Gladiator II being fall’s must-see movie. Here’s how the Roman combat epic lost its advantage.
And first-look materials unveiled at Las Vegas’s Cinemacon in April effectively anointed Gladiator II as fall’s must-see movie: a stirring spectacle of man-eating monkeys, Denzel Washington speechifying and inner-Colosseum boat warfare, all but certain to become an awards-season front-runner. Toward that end, Universal — making its biggest up-front investment in a movie project to date with parts one and two costing around $500 million to produce and promote — helped turn Wicked into an eventwith more than 400 corporate partners and innumerable branded tie-ins. And over the past year, Grande and Erivo’s brand-ambassadorship for the film has taken them from the Oscars (as presenters for Best Song and Score) in March to the Met Gala ball in May, in addition to a series of premieres for Wicked on both U.S. coasts and in Sydney, London, and Mexico City.
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