In May 1995, Mel Gibson's Braveheart opened on screens across the United States, introducing millions of viewers to a little-known medieval Scotsman and his timeless struggle against tyranny. The film was a wild box-office success, pulling in nearly $10 million on its opening weekend alone, and easily recouping its production costs of around $72 million. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was equally impressed: Braveheart garnered five Oscars, including one for Best Picture. Even now, the film ranks seventy-eighth on the IMDB.com all-time best movies list, and enjoys a healthy artistic afterlife, having been referenced, featured, or spoofed in over five hundred other productions.

The film's reception by medievalists, who often default to assessments of popular media based on historical fidelity, was decidedly chillier. Writing for the American Historical Review, Elizabeth Ewan critiqued Braveheart's “disregard for historical context” and “grating inaccuracies.” A later assessment identified eighteen factual errors in just the first two minutes of the movie, concluding that “[e]very bit and every aspect of these introductory scenes are, to put it bluntly, wrong. And the rest of the film follows the same pattern.” Such appraisals were not lost on film historian Robert Rosenstone when he came across lists of the “best” and “worst” movies on Fordham University's Internet Medieval Sourcebook. Due to its “massively inaccurate portrayal of the life of the thirteenth- century hero William Wallace,” Braveheart fell ignominiously into the latter category.

Not even ten years after Gibson's picture debuted, Jerry Bruckheimer and Antoine Fuqua teamed up to retell another very old story to a new generation. Their 2004 film, King Arthur, was markedly less successful than Braveheart. It received no Academy Award nominations, though it, too, ultimately managed to earn back its $120 million production expenditures.