Only 4 21st Century Epics Are Better Than 'Oppenheimer'

At the risk of over-generalizing, epic movies used to be a slightly bigger deal than they are now. Or it feels that way, to some extent, looking back on movie history. The likes of Gone with the Wind, Ben-Hur, and Lawrence of Arabia, to name just a few, were all massive movies that won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, and for a while, epics made some serious money, too. Gone with the Wind especially, which is the highest-grossing movie of all time, if you adjust for inflation (and you kind of should, as a side note, considering movie tickets only cost about 23 cents back in 1939). And, okay, Gone with the Wind pre-dating television as a form of entertainment does make the narrative a little more complex than “movies got big to compete with TV,” but the particularly grand epics of the 1950s and 1960s might’ve been that way, to some extent, because television was a financial threat.