The new Gladiator 2 trailer just revealed a major retcon

Gladiator 2 is on its way, and the general feeling seems to be one of cautious optimism. However, there’s also more than a few people wondering if we really needed another one. The original is so good, why risk diluting the story with a weak follow-up? Well, now a retcon in the latest trailer seems likely to divide opinion even further.

A new trailer for the movie featured one shocking scene: returning character Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) informing her son Lucius (Paul Mescal) that his true father is Maximus (Russell Crowe), the hero we followed in the original Gladiator. What?!

We’ve known for some time that Mescal was playing Lucius. In the original movie, he was a child, played by Spencer Treat Clark, and a pawn in the horrifying machinations of his uncle Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). Now, he’s all grown up and fighting his own war.

But isn’t it a bit of a reach that Lucius is Maximus’s son? In the original Gladiator, Maximus and Lucilla had a relationship before separating and meeting other people: Maximus his unnamed wife and Lucilla Lucius Verus I, the man our Lucius is named after and his supposed biological father. Yet there’s never really any indication that Maximus is Lucius’s true dad. You can certainly read it that way if you want, and assume Lucilla is just a very good actress hiding the secret well, but there’s not much evidence. So this plot twist really counts as a retcon more than anything else, and it remains to be seen if director Ridley Scott can make it work.

But if he can make it work, expect a third Gladiator movie sometime in the future. Scott recently told France’s Premiere Magazine (via Variety) that he’d “lit the fuse” in regards to a third installment. So perhaps in the future we can expect more Lucius and very possibly some daddy issues.