The rapid rise and rampant mediocrity of the expensive historical epic
Like many genres before it, the historical epic has enjoyed ebbs, flows, peaks, and valleys throughout the course of cinema history, but there’s never been a ratio of misses-to-hits quite like the one that followed in the wake of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.
As the modern era has shown repeatedly via movies like The Blair Witch Project, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Batman Begins, and Iron Man, all it takes is a single motion picture to spark a craze into life. In the blink of an eye, every major studio and production company in Hollywood is all over it like a bad rash, and in the majority of cases, there’s nothing to show for it but disappointment.
The historical epic never really went away, but it can’t be denied that it was hardly a pressing concern at the dawn of the millennium. However, once Gladiator won ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Actor’ at the Academy Awards and hoovered up $465million at the box office, there was barely a time period that didn’t get suspiciously similar treatment soon after.
Scott himself has been one of the guiltiest offenders, returning to the well – and to much lesser critical and commercial returns – with Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood, Exodus: Gods and Kings, The Last Duel, and Napoleon, but if anyone can buck the trend and deliver a worthy companion piece to Gladiator, then ironically his own sequel is in the best shape.
Within a dozen years of Gladiator‘s release, audiences had been inundated with Ed Zwick’s The Last Samurai, Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur, Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle, Zack Snyder’s 300, Oliver Stone’s Alexander, John Lee Hancock’s The Alamo, and Doug Lefler’s The Last Legion among others, stories that spanned almost the entirety of human history.
And yet, how many of them won any major trophies at the Oscars? The answer, dear reader, is none. How many of them managed to out-earn Gladiator? This time, the answer is one, but as one of the most expensive productions ever mounted at the time with a budget of $185m, Troy managing to edge a measly $30m ahead of Russell Crowe’s Maximus was hardly worth shouting from the rooftops.
Colin Farrell was left devasted by the failure of Alexander, Fuqua’s King Arthur was one of the most crushingly dull and dour-faced of the bunch, The Alamo was a catastrophic flop that lost Disney an estimated $146m, and Scott is hardly immune from failure, either.
The director’s cut of the Kingdom of Heaven is admittedly fantastic, but that wasn’t the version that underperformed in cinemas. Robin Hood was a lazy reinvention, Exodus was as flaccid as they come, The Last Duel lost a fortune, and Napoleon was perfectly OK. If the person who popularised the trend in the first place can’t stuff the lightning back into the bottle, that’s as good a sign as any.
The impetus behind so many lavish and eye-wateringly expensive historical epics springing up in the post-Gladiator years was one that’s defined far too many short-lived industry fads. ‘It worked for somebody else, it made a lot of money, and won some big awards, so by extension doing the exact same thing for no other reason than trying to replicate that success should work for us, too’. Except, it didn’t.
In a morbidly hilarious turn of events, John Woo exited Tinseltown with his tail between his legs, returned to China, dipped his toes into the waters of the past, and delivered one of the best movies of his entire career in Red Cliff, which trumped James Cameron’s Titanic at the box office to boot.
Sadly, he wasn’t willing to share his secret formula with those left Stateside, which lumped audiences with a cavalcade of eminently forgettable and costly endeavours that left the memory as soon as the credits came up.
