A rhino may soon get its day on screen in the sequel.
I read today that CinemaCon audiences saw a rhinoceros shot in preview footage shown from Ridley Scott’s Gladiator 2. (with a soldier on its back, no less)
What you might not know is that a rhino scene had also been planned for the first Gladiator film in 2000. It would have featured Russell Crowe battling one in the arena. Instead, of course, he takes on a tiger (more on that at this earlier befores & afters story).
Phil Tippett mentions bidding on it based on production storyboards, in this Empire magazine article:
“Ridley Scott’s people sent us storyboards and asked us to run a bid estimate for this scene in the Coliseum where a gladiator fights a huge rhinoceros. We sent them a bid and they looked at it and said, ‘Well, we’re going to cut it out of the movie.’ It would have been fun. I’d never worked with Ridley Scott, so I was looking forward to that. But it never went past the budgeting stage. On Blade Runner, his producers got in touch with me as they were looking to do a stop-motion mechanical owl. The same thing happened with that — they just decided they didn’t want to pay for it.”
You can see part of the storyboards below from a previous Propstore auction.
Meanwhile, VFX supe Marc Rienzo had posted on vimeo this CG test done at PDI / DreamWorks. It’s not super-clear whether this test was done specifically for the film.
As for why the rhino didn’t make it into the first film, Scott said this in another Hollywood Reporter piece:
By the way, the only thing that we weren’t able to do but really wanted to do — which I think is a little bit easier now — was a CG rhino. When we talked about the different exotic animals in the movie, we called an animal trainer and said, “Hey, can you show up in Malta with a rhino?” And he said, “Yeah, we can definitely do that and work with them. There’s just one problem. When they start moving, you can’t stop them.” (Laughs.) So, then we got a budget for the CG rhino, and that was just too expensive. So, there were practical considerations.
I do wonder if other tests had been carried out back then by other prominent VFX studios and perhaps even Mill Film which was the main vendor on the final film. Did you work on a test? Let me know!
