Normally, when historical figures show up in movies, they’re exaggerated. Desperate to keep fiction more fantastic than life, filmmakers have to take all the complexity out and turn them into mad, cartoonish caricatures of real human beings.
Usually, anyway. Emperor Commodus, though, is the exception to the rule. When the creators of the movie Gladiator cast him as their villain, they actually had to tone the facts down a little. Because the things the real Emperor Commodus did were so completely insane that nobody would have believed them.
