It's Thunderdome, but without the charm...

Were I a gladiator, my name
would be Pedanticus Maximus.

So according to the Associated Press, the Colosseum--like, capital "C" colosseum because it's the famous one in Rome--is set to be the sight of gladiator fights again. Because synergy. So, couple of things. The Associated Press article refers to the gladiatorial combat as staged, which I assume is their way of saying that they'll be fake, and not planned or organized in advance. I'm not an historian or anything, but that's dumb. A fight that isn't organized in advance is just a fight. So in a sense, all gladiatorial fights would have been staged. They just mean that these aren't actual death matches.

One would think that they wouldn't need to make that distinction, but with each passing day I find myself increasingly less confident that A: people are smart enough to know that and B: there wouldn't be an audience for such a thing.

Sixty-five million households watched a boxer pushing sixty get punched
by a Youtuber famous for spending $3.5 million on a fake Pokemon card.

Airbnb:
"How can we ruin your city?"

But that doesn't mean that this is some kind of historical reenactment thing like Colonial Williamsburg only interesting. Instead this is a corporate collab--which is how marketing people abreve collaboration--between Airbnb, Parco archeological del Colosseo (The Colosseum Archeological Park, the organization that manages the site), the movie Gladiator II--get to that in a sec--and Airbnb of all things. Yeah, the app that helps keep housing unaffordable by giving landlords a reason to keep apartments tenant-less so they can be rented out to short term vacationers. 

"Somehow, Maximus's son returned."

-Oscar Isaac in his brief

Gladiator II cameo

And because we live in a dystopian, hyper-capitalistic hellscape that threatens to crush us all, this is also somehow going to promote the sequel to the 2000 film Gladiator, which if you recall, ended with the death of the main character in a gladiator match which raises some questions. First: how can this movie center around the son of the character from the first movie? Like, the premise of Gladiator I was that Maximus becomes a gladiator after finding his wife and son murdered and--eh, who cares...

The second, more important question is who would want to be this? Well, rich finance bros, obviously. The promotion will have a lottery for Airbnb users, and the winners--no, let's call them, participants--will get to put on fake gladiator garb, brandish some equally fake weapons, and pretend to murder one another for sport on the sight of actual bloodsports. Tasteless? Sure is. But don't worry, Airbnb has a "commitment to heritage" and will donate some money or something, and that will defiantly make up for the housing crisis...right?

On the other hand, if wealthy tech and finance types want to beat each other 
with swords, who am I to complain? Maybe throw in a lions or two, and 
this could actually be the solution to a lot of the world's problems...