The Gladiator II Trailer's Song Choice Continues An Annoying Hollywood Trend

Studios love a trendy needle drop in their trailers. The 2010s were especially fraught with movie previews set to Imagine Dragons tunes, which might have been single-handedly responsible for the band being unduly maligned and declared "the new Nickelback" by musicophiles. Sorry, but I gotta defend my boys; one of them's from my hometown!

The problem wasn't the songs but how they were used — that and, in the case of Imagine Dragons, how often they were utilized. When the trailer for "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" deployed "It's Time," the band's debut single was seamlessly meshed with clips from Stephen Chbosky's bittersweet coming-of-age drama. However, when "Believer" suddenly hit in the teaser for "Murder on the Orient Express," it just shattered the mood. This wasn't a carefully-constructed attempt to enhance the murder-mystery's chilly atmosphere, it was Hollywood aspiring to be "hip" in a painfully obvious stab at making Kenneth Branagh's Agatha Christie adaptation more appealing to the youths. (Marketing for Branagh's follow up, "Death on the Nile," made a similar effort to juice things up with a remix of Depeche Mode's "Policy of Truth," but at least there the song was thematically consistent with the film it was advertising.)

Today's newly-unveiled trailer for the Ridley Scott-directed "Gladiator II," a sequel that's been almost a quarter-century in the making, only continues this frustrating trend. The actual footage serves up all the fire and brimstone spectacle you could ask for, with Scott going recklessly over budget to deliver massive invading armies and blood-splattered skirmishes with rhinos in the Colosseum. However, its use of Ye (aka the artist previously known as Kanye West) and Jay-Z's hip-hop/rap classic "No Church in the Wild" — which also accompanied the sizzle reel shown at CinemaCon — feels strained in a way that it shouldn't.

"No Church in the Wild" deservedly topped the charts upon its original release, and has more than earned its legacy as a hallowed piece of 21st century pop music. It's also hard to begrudge the "Gladiator II" marketing for going back to the song so long after its heyday, especially since it should theoretically work for the sequel. The dark, haunting lyrics allude to empires in decline and mere mortals forced to survive in a world where the institutions of faith and religion have failed them — themes that Scott has gone back to over and over in his films, and looks to revisit once more here.

Would that the "Gladiator II" trailer actually tried to tap into any of that. Instead, it singles out lines like "Blood stains the Colosseum doors," which is undeniably applicable on a superficial level, but it's also so on-the-nose that it mostly just makes you want to groan. The rest of the song simply feels like it's been laid on top of the footage to make it seem "cool" to studio execs convinced they know how to court Gen-Z for Scott's historical treatise, as opposed to being creatively integrated with the footage to bring out fresh meaning and richer emotions (like the "Logan" teaser memorably did with Johnny Cash's "Hurt" cover).

Weirder still, the trailer for a completely different Denzel Washington movie, Daniel Espinosa's 2012 action-thriller "Safe House," did a far better job of using "No Church in the Wild" over a decade ago. Period pieces are a difficult sell, no doubt about it, but this just isn't the solution.

"Gladiator II" opens in theaters on November 22, 2024.