Written by David Scarpa based on a story he wrote with Peter Craig, the film was produced by Scott Free Productions and distributed by Paramount Pictures.

It stars Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, Lior Raz, Derek Jacobi, Connie Nielsen, and Denzel Washington.

Mescal portrays Lucius Verus Aurelius, the exiled Prince of Rome, who becomes a prisoner of war and fights as a gladiator for Macrinus, a former slave who plots to overthrow the twin emperors Geta and Caracalla.

The Roman army led by General Acacius invades and conquers the kingdom, killing Arishat and enslaving Hanno and the other survivors.

Disillusioned with war, Acacius requests a break with his wife Lucilla, the daughter of Aurelius, but the emperors refuse and plot to conquer Persia and India.

After Hanno wins, he recites a verse from Virgil's Aeneid, revealing his Roman education to the emperors and raising Macrinus' suspicion.

Egyptian-Palestinian actress May Calamawy,[24] who was originally set to play an "important character",[25] appears in the film in an uncredited non-speaking background role as Macrinus' companion.

The plot, set 15 years later, included the Praetorian Guards ruling Rome, and an older Lucius—the son of Lucilla in Gladiator—searching for the truth about his biological father.

[44][45][46][17] After experiencing financial difficulties in the 2000s, DreamWorks Pictures—including the rights to Gladiator and the rest of the pre-2006 live-action film library—was sold to Paramount Pictures in 2006 and development on the sequel was halted.

[20] He also said that he and everyone involved in the original film were busy so no one thought about making a sequel, but as time passed, he noticed how well Gladiator aged to the point of seemingly having "taken a life of its own" that it made him feel that he owed the audience a continuation to that story.

[55] Scott stated in a 2023 interview that they had struggled for 10 months to write the script four years previously, until they revisited the idea of Lucius as the "survivor" of the original film.

[64] Mescal was chosen after Daria Cercek and Michael Ireland had seen his performance in the West End revival of A Streetcar Named Desire, claiming that the "ladies in the audience [had been] very vocal" when he had taken his shirt off.

[65] Having seen the original film when he was 13 with his father, Mescal was invited for breakfast by Lucy Fisher and Douglas Wick, who informed him about the sequel's casting, proceeding to tell Scott about his physical capabilities due to playing Gaelic football in his youth while Scott found a striking resemblance to Richard Harris, who played Marcus Aurelius in the original film, so he opted to cast Mescal despite his newcomer status under the pretext he launched careers likewise for Sigourney Weaver and Brad Pitt when he cast them in his films Alien (1979) and Thelma & Louise (1991) respectively.

To prepare for the role, Mescal didn't get in touch with Crowe to avoid audiences potentially thinking the film will define his career, trained physically, ate sweet potato and ground beef to put on 18 pounds of muscle and remembered Roman history he studied at school,[66] in addition to practice fighting choreography, horse training and sword fighting.

[17] In April 2023, it was announced that Connie Nielsen and Djimon Hounsou would reprise their roles as Lucilla and Juba respectively, while Joseph Quinn was added to the cast as Emperor Geta.

[70][71] In May 2023, Pedro Pascal, May Calamawy, Lior Raz, Derek Jacobi, Peter Mensah and Matt Lucas joined the cast of the film, with Fred Hechinger entering negotiations to play Caracalla after Keoghan had to drop out over scheduling conflicts with Saltburn (2023).

[72][25][17] Similarly to Mescal, Pascal underwent intense gladiator training for his role, which he found challenging, but deemed the experience "the most exciting" of his career due to growing up with Scott's films.

[79] For a fight sequence, a rhinoceros was created via 3D printing controlled by radio remote, but filming the scene took two or three days and affected Mescal's physicality due to the temperature.

This sparked speculation on whether pitting the two films together could lead to a scenario similar to the Barbenheimer phenomenon, which was a result of Barbie and Oppenheimer both being released on July 21, 2023.

[98] The MA15+ rating was reinstated for the uncut home media release, with a revised consumer advice of "strong animal cruelty, violence and blood and gore".

[99] Footage of the film screened at the CinemaCon 2024 in Las Vegas included scenes of Joseph Quinn as Geta dressed in a white toga and laurel-leaf crown dramatically plunging his thumb downward to note the fate of defeated gladiators, with Nielsen in the background.

[77] In June of that year, Scott showcased an extended clip of the film featuring Denzel Washington, Paul Mescal, Pedro Pascal, Connie Nielsen, and Quinn.

[102] Jennifer Ouellette of Ars Technica said the trailer indicated the film "promises to be just as much of a visual feast, as a new crop of power players (plus a couple of familiar faces) clash over the future of Rome".

[103] Rather than using an orchestral score, the first trailer used "No Church in the Wild" by Jay-Z and Kanye West, which caused a backlash among film fans who said it was too modern of a song choice.

[105] On the first day of the 2024 NFL season, Paramount Pictures and Pepsi announced a campaign cross-promoting the film with the soft drink's sponsorship of the National Football League.

The website's consensus reads: "Echoing its predecessor while upping the bloodsport and camp, Gladiator II is an action extravaganza that derives much of its strength and honor from Denzel Washington's scene-stealing performance.

[4] Christopher Campbell at Rotten Tomatoes summarized the reviews as having praised the action, performances, story, and visuals, and said some argued that "plot-wise it's actually too similar to its predecessor".

The real-life Macrinus was a praetorian prefect of Berber descent from North Africa who became Roman emperor in 217 AD after conspiring against Caracalla and having him murdered.

This myth comes from an incorrect interpretation of Sacramentum of gladiators, which when translated into English means "I swear to let myself be burned" (bonded, punished, and killed with fire).

[168][169] Scott later stated that the movie is in early stages of development and intended to be the next project he works on,[170] though the following month he stated to The New York Times his next projects after Gladiator II will be a Bee Gees biopic, set to shoot in September 2025, and an adaptation of the science fiction novel The Dog Stars, set to shoot in Italy in April 2025.