Ridley Scott has been trying to squeeze a rhinoceros into the Colosseum for 25 years.
Back in 1999, when he was shooting his first Gladiator film, he talked to animal trainers about the possibility of bringing a real 6,000-pound rhino onto his set but was told the horned animals were too difficult to control. Then he talked to CGI experts to see if a digitized one could be rendered for the movie but learned that the technology was budget-bustingly expensive.
For the next quarter-century, it became a running joke among Scott and his crew. “If we ever do a sequel,” Scott’s producer, Doug Wick, said in an interview in 2020, “Ridley gets his rhino.”
Well, they finally did a sequel, and Ridley got his rhino, a state-of-the-art, remote-controlled animatronic version…
