How would you define the "Epic" film as a genre?

You've got it backwards: the budget works to back up the concept of scale, not the other way around.

okay ...either way...if the story being told doesnt demand or doesnt get the budget of upwards of 90 million then its not an epic. Either no one is giving the filmmakers that kind of money or the story being told is smaller than what defines an epic. Same story can be told for 40 million and 100 million but one will feel cheaper and other will feel bigger. Even if 40 million is given to a greater director he can't make it look massive in scale.

I’m sorry, but I don’t follow this logic. The budget doesn’t necessarily dictate the scale of the film, it’s the idea of the film.

you are right..but you do need money to put that idea on screen and thats where budget comes in. Just because a director has an epic idea doesnt mean the movie he is gonna make is an epic. You need budget to make it look epic. Lack of budget can assemble only 15 horses in a battle field instead of 150 horses. So they have to use cheapo vfx or shoot around that 15 horses to make it look like a 150 horse battle which it never can.

Yes, it's a matter of breadth and compass. In the '50s and '60s most epics were shot in CinemaScope or other wide screen formats. I recall The Robe (1953) which may have been the first. In addition to the ones you mentioned there were El Cid (1961) and Doctor Zhivago (1965)-- all wonderful epic classics.

To be clear, this is not some minor detail: having the orientation backwards means thinking quality starts with budget, rather than understanding that budget simply has the potential to aid in it. It's a faulty premise that will (and as we can see, has) infect all the reasoning that comes after it and lead to constant misunderstandings about the nature of both art and quality.

This is, per usual, just an arbitrary opinion, stated as if it were an authoritative fact. I'm not sure what it adds to the discussion to just declare things arbitrarily, but since you keep doing it, I'm just going to keep pointing it out.

Yup, usually this, which is not dispositive by itself. Ever hear of Star Wars? You know, the movie where they used a tennis shoe on a string to represent a giant spaceship? So, literally a "shoestring budget."

That's ceteris paribus, dude, but things never are really paribus in reality. As evidence, simply observe how many expensive CGI-laden films look flimsy and cheap despite their budget.

What you're doing here is essentially saying "being tall helps you be better at basketball, therefore this random tall person is better than this somewhat shorter person at it, just because of that fact." But much more goes into that sport--and much more goes into filmmaking. Basically, you're confusing a null hypothesis for a perfect and unified measurement.

I think, like having the budget/scale orientation backwards above, this is another revealing sentence: you say it can't look massive in scale, which betrays the assumption that "epic" is only about look, rather than feel or suggestion, even though there's a wonderful cinematic tradition of achieving these things in subtle and indirect ways. In fact, you might argue that's a huge part of what the art form is, since it's virtually all artifice.

Credit where it's due: this is a reasonable response. I don't think it jibes with the broader declarations earlier, but I think we'll probably all agree that there are some things you can't do cheaply, and certain types of films are hard to make through implication. Your example certainly holds. It's just that we're at the point where the technology to get the occasional wide shot is pretty darn cheap now, and a director who knows their budgetary limitations has a lot of ways to work around them.