History Main / GladiatorGames

* ''Series/The100'': During the TimeSkip between seasons 4 and 5, Octavia becomes leader of Wonkru, the people left in the bunker to survive the apocalypse. Inspired by the books Bellamy used to read to her as a child, Octavia models her ruling style on that on Roman emperors, including using Colosseum-esque cage matches as punishment for any and all trangressions. She earns the title "Blodreina," or "The Red Queen" as a result of her brutal regime. No one is safe from the fighting pits, as Octavia demonstrates when she throws Bellamy in them for his EtTuBrute betrayal. Takes a {{Squick}} turn in "The Dark Year," when it's revealed that those that perished in the pits were used [[spoiler: as food]] when blight hit the algae farm.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheMansionsOfTheGods'': Treated as modern ProfessionalWrestling, complete with complicated named moves that require both participants to work and figurines.

* ''ComicBook/TheWarlordDC'': Travis Morgan was captured and made into a gladiatorial slave. He eventually led a GladiatorRevolt that gained him the title of Warlord.

* ''TabletopGame/GURPSBanestorm'': Megalos is a [[EvilEmpire not-very-nice empire]] explicitly modeled, ''in setting,'' on Imperial Rome. Hence, it is completely inevitable that it will feature blood-soaked arenas hosting gladiatorial games. This is mentioned fairly briefly in the main book covering the setting; a published adventure for a previous edition of the game, "Fighters of the Purple Rage", deals with a band of gladiators who escape from the imperial arena. Rather oddly, it assumes that a party of (presumably more or less heroic) [=PCs=] will be willing to pursue these skilled and desperate fighters into locations which they must know better, in order to capture them and return them to slavery and death.

While gladiators were originally all slaves, over time a class of professional gladiators also emerged.[[note]]For non-citizens and impoverished Romans, this provided food and shelter, and if they were skilled enough to survive even the opportunity to earn significant wealth.[[/note]] These voluntary gladiators will ''very'' rarely appear in fiction, whereas in RealLife they were often the most skilled fighters in the arenas and by the time of the Roman Empire actually outnumbered the enslaved gladiators. The vast majority of gladiators were men, though female gladiatrices are not unknown to history.[[note]]At the very least, regulations on the games existed concerning them specifically. It's believed that many women who were drawn to the arena were free citizens motivated by fame, fortune, and independence, or the daughters of retired male gladiators who followed in their fathers' footsteps.[[/note]] That said, the Romans saw them as only an exotic and/or erotic novelty, and many regarded their existence (and of women's athletics in general) as a corruption of traditional Roman gender roles, hence why women were eventually banned from competing in the arena sometime around 200 AD during the reign of Septimius Severus.

* ''Film/FutureWorld2018'': The Drug Lord makes the Prince fight one of her men to get the cure for his mother's disease. He manages to win, but then has to dig it out of the dead guy's stomach, as she had him swallow it beforehand.

Very popular in AncientRome settings and in SwordAndSandal settings based on it, although HollywoodHistory comes into play for some of the elements. In RealLife, Rome was far from the only culture that hosted gladiatorial games -- it was just the one which gave them the biggest production values -- and indeed they seemingly adopted them from surrounding Italian cultures in the first place. Also, while Hollywood gladiators always fight to the death, in real life only around a tenth of fights between professional gladiators actually resulted in death, as gladiators were expensive to train and difficult to replace; battles to the death were widely advertised specifically ''because'' they were so rare. Most gladiators who got killed in the end of the fight were either DirtyCoward types, or [[MercyKill so badly wounded they were not expected to survive]].[[note]]The manner of the CoupDeGrace varied, but one common method, supported by archaeological evidence, was to have a man dressed as Dīs Pater, a Roman god of the underworld, hit the doomed gladiator in the head with a large mallet.[[/note]] Criminals condemned to die by the sword were not considered gladiators, and for them death was predetermined.