BRAVEHEART launched a genre

i dont know..but i feel b4 braveheart..historical war hero films werent that big..now ..its like everywhere

gladiator
alexander..2 projects
troy
the odyssey
kingdom of heaven
hannibal (hannibal baraca)
king arthur

and other films...what u think?

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What do you mean by "big"? Do you mean there weren't that many, like there seem to be now? or do you mean they weren't critically acclaimed, like Braveheart, Gladiator? (The others you list have yet to prove themselves).

I think there were actually quite a few, and Ben-Hur is the most acclaimed of the entire genre.

Here's just four off the top of my head:

Ivanhoe - 1952
The Vikings -1958
Ben-Hur - 1959 (12 nominations and 11 wins; I'd say that's pretty big )
Spartacus - 1960

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Let's not forget Lawrence of Arabia here.

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As far as this latest batch of period so-called epics, the Hollywood trend is due to two things, neither of them Braveheart: Gladiator and advances in technology.

Braveheart was released domestically in May 1995, and while it did respectible numbers at the boxoffice, the U.S. take was "only" around $75-million...about equal to its pre-marketing budget. And some of that total came from it's Oscar rerelease. It did win big at the Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Director, and while the total gross when accounting for the entire world brought it up to around $200-million, that's still not the kind of return on an investment that makes the suits salivate and greenlight similar pics - even with the Oscars. The evidence to this fact is no other studios mounted any projects of similar scale in the year or two following Braveheart.

By 2000 when Gladiator was released, advances in CGI made it much more cost-effective to create gigantic period sets and ended the need for thousands of extras, as was the costly tradtion dating back to the great Silent epics like Ben-Hur (1925), all the way through the boom of the '50s and '60s with the likes of Spartacus (1960), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959) and Cleopatra(1963), and even all the way up to Gibson's Braveheart. CGI made it much, much easier to mount such a flick.

That relative cost-effectiveness then coupled with Gladiator's $180-million or so U.S. boxoffice and its bag full of Oscars (including Best Picture), THAT is what made the "epic" an attractive proposition in Hollywierd again. If Gladiator had to be made the way Spartacus was, the Oscar potential would never have entered into it, as the production cost would have been so high it never would have been made in the first place.


So while the producers who took the chance and made Gladiator may well have had Braveheart's success to bolster their own hopes, it was CGI that really fueled this current crop. After these start losing money again and no longer justify their cost, they'll fall away for a while.

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And they will lose money again, mark my words, because these movies, let's not forget it, are [more often than not] bad.

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i mean werent that many or popular..like
ya spartacus was 60s and all
but like after braveheart...almost like every 2 eyars a historical hero type movie is getting made u know?

Mmmm-hmmmm. And what historical hero type movie was made in 1996, 1997, 1998 or 1999?

Like I said, it wasn't Braveheart, it was CGI and Gladiator.

i didnt say every year either..but so close to each other..the odyssey which was a tv movie and made into a tv series was 97

So Braveheart winning Oscars inspired the folks at Hallmark to adapt the Odyssey for free television?


Yes, clearly you've done your homework and have the facts to back it up too: Braveheart launched a genre.

no need to be sarcastic..the point of this post is to say that after braveheart, historical epics are becoming a hot genre thats all
adieu

I thought your point was that Bravheart created a genre. Which it, in fact, did not.

Man, now you're just relying on the dates!

Technically, if we're just going to use dates to found an argument, then I can say that historical epics have been "becoming a hot genre" since The Birth of a Nation.

I agree, there is a lot of crap released under the guise of "epics", and we need to be careful b/c the good ones could be overshadowed...

"All these old genres are ripe for revisiting. There is a whole generation raised on video games that are inspired by the idea of gladiator combat."

Scott's first choice to play Maximus was Mel Gibson.

"You look at what Mel did with Braveheart, so of course you think of him first," explains Scott. "Mel's first reaction was that he was too old, but I think he'd already committed to The Patriot. When he wasn't available we went to Russell."

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Although I don't agree that Braveheart launched a genre, I don't understand how CGI caused the suits to "salivate" because of cost-effectiveness. Braveheart cost $72 mil (pre-marketing), Gladiator cost $103 mil, Phantom Menace $115 mil, Attack of the Clones $120 mil, Star Wars: Ep. III $115 mil, and Troy $185 mil. CGI doesn't seem to be driving the cost of these films down, and the box office would have to continue to rise even higher to accomplish the same profit Braveheart achieved without CGI.

You must not understand how quickly movie budgets rise. To make Braveheart completely without CGI five or eight years after 1995 would cost over a hundred million. Easy. Also, unlike Gladiator and the Star Wars movies, very few sets were needed (certainly not the elaborate type that would be construced via CGI), instead using pastoral vistas and old castles. They filmed Braveheart all over Scottish and Irish countryside. Gladiator was not filmed in Rome. The Phantom Menace was not filmed on Nabu in a galaxy far, far away. To build gigantic Roman sets and rely on matte paintings as was the custom since the Silent era, Gladiator's cost would have been impossible for any studio to finance (or any three studios for that matter). CGI makes the sets and limitless number of extras cheap and easy (and, by the by, also makes 'em look like crap). Thus, cranking out so-called epic after so-called epic has become cost-effective...in Hollywood terms.

So it's not so much that they're cost-effective, it's that they're able to put them out for a price that is still reasonable to think will make a profit. Without CGI, the same films wouldn't be made because their budget would be so high that a profit would be too difficult to achieve.

Is that it?

They could still be made, but they would have to leave much of what we do see out of them. Imagine Gladiator without the panoramic (CGI) views of Rome. Or Troy without the ships, trojan horse, or 75k soldiers. But you know this man. You're savvy.

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Yeah, I'm just playing devil's advocate, trying to clear up the conflict between "cost-effective" and $185 mil budget

I understand. But without CGI, how much do you think it would have cost to make this film? $400-$450 million?