In 2001, Ridley Scott's Gladiator won the Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Picture. However, on its original release, it was not the critical success that one might assume in retrospect. On the contrary, many of the most respected mainstream publications gave the film lukewarm, and in some cases overtly hostile, reviews, a situation that demonstrates the ways in which critical judgements can change over time. The following chapter is a study of the reception of the cycle of films that followed Gladiator, films that were understood as resurrecting the epics of the post-war cinema which included The Ten Commandments (De Mille 1956), Ben-Hur (Wyler 1959) and Spartacus (Kubrick 1960). The aim here is not to portray this reception as an example of ‘failed criticism’, nor as possessing an authentic moment that represents the ‘truth’ of these films; rather, it is to explore the meanings of films in specific periods, meanings which may be different from those of the present but which are just as ‘real’; and require one to recognise that the current meanings of films are as historically contingent as those of other periods.

Indeed, when I embarked on this study, I expected to find a process in which the evaluation of the cycle changed from a celebration of Gladiator to a condemnation of Clash of the Titans (Leterrier 2010), an expectation that was quickly confounded. If reviews of Gladiator were more critical than I had remembered, reviews of Clash of the Titans were far more positive.