Ridley Scott has made some of the most iconic movies in modern cinema, some of which spun off into major Hollywood franchises. Scott says in a recent Vanity Fair interview that he “should have done the sequels to Alien and to Blade Runner,” but the task went to other filmmakers instead. There are multiple reasons for that—those films came early in his career, and “At that time, I didn’t want to go through it again,” Scott explains. But part of the reason he may not have wanted to “go through it” was because of the Hollywood strictures placed on a young up-and-coming director.
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“I’m the author of two franchises. Most directors in Hollywood—certainly, let’s say, at my level—don’t let that stuff go,” Scott says, presumably meaning the rights to his movies. “But I did Alien as my second movie, so I didn’t have much choice. And Blade Runner was my third movie. So, I had no choice because I had very tough partners. It was kind of ‘Welcome to Hollywood.’” In fact, “I was never told or asked” about making sequels, he claims. “You can imagine I wasn’t happy.”
In other words, because Scott didn’t have ownership of the properties that he launched early in his career, the studios or producers he worked with on those films could do whatever they wanted with them. That means: give the movies away to someone else (like James Cameron and David Fincher in the Alien franchise) or put them on the shelf. He was supposed to direct the Blade Runner sequel more than 30 years after his original film, but had to pass up the opportunity in order to work on an Alien installment, Prometheus. And in that case, one can assume the studio was moving forward with a new Blade Runner whether Scott was involved or not. (“I was regretful, although he did a good job,” Scott says of Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049).
All this to say, Scott was “slow out the starting gate” in creating the continuity of his own franchises, but he’s finally doing so with Gladiator II. The first Gladiator film came at a time when Scott was more established in Hollywood, so it seems he’s now able to return to it on his own time, on his own terms, without the interference of “tough partners.” And he sees it as the right time to return to this particular sandbox. “The leadership is in total chaos. We have demagogues—that’s a good word. The people who are in charge are out of their minds, and everyone is too afraid to contradict. That’s familiar ground right now.”