In the spring of 2000, some three decades after the well-publicised flops of Cleopatra (Mankiewicz 1963), The Fall of the Roman Empire (Mann 1964) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (Stevens 1965), unsuspecting cinema audiences were once again presented with the lavish and costly historical epics which had ruled the box office a generation earlier. Ridley Scott's Gladiator, in a seemingly sudden departure from many of Scott's previous films, told the epic tale of a Roman general-turned-gladiator ‘who defied an emperor’ and who (albeit posthumously) founded a new Roman Republic. Though few could have predicted it at the time, the global success of his film ‘resurrected long-standing traditions of historical and cinematic spectacles’, and Scott would later find himself credited with re-launching a genre which had lain dormant for 35 years, heralding ‘a sudden resurrection of toga films after thirty-six years in disgrace and exile’, which prompted critics and scholars alike emphatically to declare the return of the epic. Indeed, looking back over the first decade of the twenty-first century, in terms of films and box-office takings the effect of this return is clear: in each year from 2000 to 2010, historical epics have made the top ten highest-grossing films, and attracted numerous awards and nominations. Accordingly, from Gladiator to The Immortals (Singh 2011), via Troy (Petersen 2004), Kingdom of Heaven (Scott 2005) and Alexander (Stone 2004), the decade came to be characterised by a slew of historically-themed, costly, spectacular, lavish – in a word, ‘epic’ – films which, though not always as profitable as might have been hoped, performed respectably at the box office.