As much as we hate to admit it, the culture that absorbs Hollywood permeates to the plebs, sooner or later. Beyond the box office, traditional, rugged masculinity has been evicted from the wider culture, too – off the sports pages, out of the pub, away from anywhere a teenage boy might once have picked up a template for how to be a bloke without being a brute.
If the most famous leading men on the planet are more concerned with CrossFit and vulnerability, but have little resembling toughness, self-reliance or backbone, it leaves a gap. So, is the view ascribed to Ridley Scott right?
Whatever the answer, beneath the underwhelming box-office figures for Gladiator II lies a cultural shift. Hollywood’s leading men have gone from looking as though they could survive the apocalypse, to appearing more likely to throw their wives at the zombies to save themselves. Audiences, bless them, still seem to want both – the sculpted abs and the sense that their owner has, at some point in his life, had to use his fists.
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