The Trend: Big-budget historical epics. Ridley Scott's Roman epic was both a critical and commercial smash-hit, winning five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Actor and grossing over $450m at the box office. As well as rekindling the career of its director and making Russel Crowe one of the biggest movie stars on the planet, Gladiator was also indirectly responsible for the slew of big-budget historical movies that followed in its wake. Despite the success following its release, the production was a difficult one. The $100m budget was a huge gamble given that the genre had seen little success in recent times, anchored by a director that hadn't had a hit movie since Thelma & Louise in 1991 and a star who had never led a movie of this scale. There were also numerous problems with the script that forced constant rewrites, and of course the death of supporting player Oliver Reed that forced the production to spend a further $3.2m to complete his performance digitally. Of course, all of this was quickly forgotten when Gladiator became one of the biggest hits of the year and just like that, the historical epic was all the rage again. Within five years, a number of big-budget historical movies clearly inspired by Gladiator's success made their way to theaters. Out of all of these, only Wolfgang Petersen's Troy in 2004 found any real success and grossed almost $500m despite mixed reviews. That same year, The Alamo became one of the biggest box office flops in history, the story of King Arthur was given the Jerry Bruckheimer treatment and Oliver Stone released the first of several versions of his passion project Alexander, which barely made back its $155m budget. Even Ridley Scott tried to repeat the trick with Kingdom of Heaven in 2005 and Robin Hood in 2010, neither of which found a similar audience to Gladiator.
I don't do social media, so like or follow me in person but please maintain a safe distance or the authorities will be notified. Don't snap me though, I'll probably break. I was once labelled a misogynist on this very site in a twenty paragraph-long rant for daring to speak ill of the Twilight franchise. I stand by what I said, it's crap.
