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Russell Crowe’s 3-Hour Historical Epic Officially Arrives on HBO Max

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Russell Crowe is setting himself up for a very successful 2026. After bringing his WWII passion project Nuremberg to theaters, and earning plenty of acclaim in the process, Crowe is set to once again bring the entertainment with The Weight, a gritty Western alongside Ethan Hawke; the upcoming Netflix true-crime original, Unabomber; the fantasy epic with Game of Thrones‘ Rose Leslie, The Last Druid; and, perhaps most anticipated of all, the Highlander reboot alongside Henry Cavill. Crowe has already posted on social media about training to get into Gladiator shape for the latter.

The 2000s arguably marked the absolute peak of Russell Crowe’s career — with hits such as Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind, Master and Commander, and 3:10 to Yuma, among others. But Crowe has recently found a tough time regaining traction at the box office, even with an occasional fan-favorite like The Nice Guys dotting his resume. A pair of ill-timed horror movies — The Exorcism and The Pope’s Exorcist — underwhelmed at the box office, and two big-budget attempts — Kraven the Hunter and 2017’s The Mummy — essentially killed their respective franchises. Outside his work as Jor-El in Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel, however, Crowe’s last real box office hit came in 2012 in a sweeping epic that landed on HBO Max this month.













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Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz
Which Oscar Best Picture
Is Your Perfect Movie?

Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
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Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.

🪜Parasite

🌀Everything Everywhere

☢️Oppenheimer

🐦Birdman

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🪙No Country for Old Men

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01

What kind of film experience do you actually want?
The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.





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02

Which idea grabs you most in a film?
Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?





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03

How do you like your story told?
Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.





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04

What makes a truly great antagonist?
The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?





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05

What do you want from a film’s ending?
The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?





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06

Which setting pulls you in most?
Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.





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07

What cinematic craft impresses you most?
Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.





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08

What kind of main character do you root for?
The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.





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09

How do you feel about a film that takes its time?
Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.





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10

What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema?
The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?





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The Academy Has Decided
Your Perfect Film Is…

Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.

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Parasite

You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.

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Everything Everywhere All at Once

You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.

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Oppenheimer

You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.

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Birdman

You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.

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No Country for Old Men

You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.

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HBO Max Brings the French Revolution

Les Misérables, the musical drama directed by Tom Hooper is now available to stream on HBO Max. In 2012, Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman led an absolutely stacked cast in Hooper’s adaptation of the Broadway musical, singing its way to a $442 million box office haul. The film created the trend of big musicals being released in theaters for Christmas — Into the Woods, La La Land, The Greatest Showman, and Mary Poppins Returns all followed suit. While Crowe was largely lambasted for his singing in the film, the rest of the cast — A-listers Jackman, Amanda Seyfried, and Eddie Redmayne, and Broadway vets Samantha Barks and Aaron Tveit — were all praised; the film earned a 70% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. Anne Hathaway, who is now ruling the box office with The Odyssey, even won an Oscar for her supporting role as the tragic Fantine.

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Les Misérables is now available on HBO Max. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.


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Release Date
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December 18, 2012

Runtime

158 minutes

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Writers

William Nicholson

Producers
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Debra Hayward, Eric Fellner, Tim Bevan, Cameron Mackintosh, Bernard Bellew

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