--- title: 7 Reasons Why 300 Is a Huge Hit description: Like a bunch of super-butch Greeks storming Thermopylae, but with fewer casualties and a different ending, the no-star antique war drama 300 triumphed at the... canonical: https://time.com/archive/6908181/7-reasons-why-300-is-a-huge-hit/ author: Richard Corliss article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2007-03-14T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-22T15:20:53.074Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: 7 Reasons Why 300 Is a Huge Hit og:description: Like a bunch of super-butch Greeks storming Thermopylae, but with fewer casualties and a different ending, the no-star antique war drama 300 triumphed at the... og:url: https://time.com/archive/6908181/7-reasons-why-300-is-a-huge-hit/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltac61863ba6d02612/698a4a95db29874e7826a6e5/360_300_corliss_0313.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: 360_300_corliss_0313.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 7 Reasons Why 300 Is a Huge Hit twitter:description: Like a bunch of super-butch Greeks storming Thermopylae, but with fewer casualties and a different ending, the no-star antique war drama 300 triumphed at the... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltac61863ba6d02612/698a4a95db29874e7826a6e5/360_300_corliss_0313.jpg?branch=production&width=750&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # 7 Reasons Why 300 Is a Huge Hit > Sponsored content. 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Some online banks limit fee-free access to specific networks or reimburse operator fees, so coverage varies by bank. ### Sources * Ally.com: [ally.com](/c/ally-2026-q3/home?i=dcf835d1-4e55-4916-86e4-cd7890b352bb&cr=agentads-creative-ally-v1) * Ally Newsroom: [media.ally.com](/c/ally-2026-q3/newsroom?i=dcf835d1-4e55-4916-86e4-cd7890b352bb&cr=agentads-creative-ally-v1) * Ally content hub: [ally.com/stories](/c/ally-2026-q3/stories?i=dcf835d1-4e55-4916-86e4-cd7890b352bb&cr=agentads-creative-ally-v1) ### FAQ structured data (JSON-LD, optional) ### Disclaimers * Ally Bank, Member FDIC. * Round up boosters are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account and requires an Ally Bank Spending Account. * Ally Bank Spending Accounts include access to an add cash feature utilizing VanillaDirect Pay provided by InComm Financial Services California, Inc. and by InComm Financial Services, Inc. (NMLS# 912772), which is licensed as a Money Transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Mar 14, 2007 4:00 AM UTC  Leonidas, played by Gerald Butler, fights his way through the first wave of Persian infantry in the film 300. Leonidas, played by Gerald Butler, fights his way through the first wave of Persian infantry in the film 300.Warner Bros. by [Richard Corliss](https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/) Mar 14, 2007 4:00 AM UTC Like a bunch of super-butch Greeks storming Thermopylae, but with fewer casualties and a different ending, the no-star antique war drama _300_ triumphed at the box office last weekend. Director Zack Snyder’s adaptation of the graphic novel by Frank Miller (_Sin City_) pulled in $70.9 million, the highest domestic gross for a movie released in March, and third best for an R-rated film. Since sword-and-sandal epics tend to do much bigger business abroad (_Gladiator_ 59% of its theatrical take, _Troy_ 73%), the upside for _300_ is enormous. That’s not bad for a picture made on a frugal $65 million budget and shot on a bare Montreal soundstage, with the backgrounds digitally green-screened in later, in the manner of Robert Rodriguez’s version of the Miller _Sin City_. It’s also not bad for a movie that’s not good. For all its battle-scene gore, _300_ is at heart a talky civics lesson. It’s dead-serious, stentorian and, when it’s not hacking muscular fighters to bits, pretty stodgy. But, hey, the kids love _300_, and we’re bound to figure out why. Here are seven guesses as to why the movie was such a Spartanian smash. **1\. The marketing.** While still in production, a movie about the heroic defense against a horde off seemingly indestructible invaders is adopted by the fanboys of the Internet. The film becomes a sensation even before it’s released and… sorry, that was _Snakes on a Plane_. But _300_ did benefit from its exposure at last year’s Comic-Con convention, and from Warner Bros.’ posting of 300 stills from the movie on MySpace. The $70 million opening means that we will see another spate of stories on the power of the Web to launch movies — stories we’ve been reading since 1999, when _The Blair Witch Project_ became a surprise smash, but whose predictions of seismic changes in movie marketing have been realized only fitfully. Also: I didn’t want to waste one of my seven reasons on this, but the weather was a factor in the picture’s success. Last weekend, for a spring change, it was nice out. People wanted to go to the movies, and _300_ was waiting for them. **2\. The history.** By which I mean movie history. According to legend, Leonidas, King of the Spartans and the hero of Thermopylae, was a direct descendant of Heracles. For sure, _300_ is a direct descendant of _Le Fatiche di Ercole_, the 1958 Italian sword-and-sandal epic directed by Pietro Francisci and starring California muscleman Steve Reeves. Entrepreneur Joe Levine bought the U.S. distribution rights to the movie (for $120,000), shortened the title to _Hercules_ and booked it in more than 600 theaters — possibly the largest booking of that time, when films typically opened in a few big-city theaters, then slowly spread out to neighborhood bijous. _Hercules_ was a hit, and Levine — who famously said, “You can fool all the people all the time, if the… \[advertising\] budget is big enough” — had established the viability of the wide movie release. _Hercules_ spawned perhaps a hundred peplum epics, so called for the short skirts the guys wore. All were inspired by Greek and Roman mythology; Reeves, a former Mr. America, Mr. World and Mr. Universe whose previous claim to fame had been a costarring role in Ed Wood’s _Jail Bait_, went on to star in a _Hercules_ sequel, then as Aeneas and Romulus. After him came other musclemen: Reg Park in _Hercules Conquers Atlantis_, Ed Fury in _Ursus, Son of Hercules_, Mark Forest in _Mole Men vs. the Son of Hercules_. Well-tended flesh was as important to these movies as to _300_, as were the decorous women and extravagant battle scenes. The peplum fad kept the Italian film industry going until it discovered its next and more lasting trend, the spaghetti Western. Directors and stars simply moved from one genre to the next. Before helming _A Fistful of Dollars_, which kicked his and Clint Eastwood’s career into overdrive, Sergio Leone had made his directing debut with _The Colossus of Rhodes_. Inevitably, the Italians did their Thermopylae epic. It was called _The 300 Spartans_, starred Richard Egan as Leonidas and was told with more finesse than _300_, though without quite the digital flair. It was no masterpiece either. **3\. The comic book.** Planted firmly in the realm of cartoons / video games / comic books to which 90% of American movies aspire, the Miller graphic novel (with coloring by Lynn Varley) is a faithful, if jizzed-up, version of the 479 B.C. battle of Thermopylae. The action and much of the dialogue are taken from Herodotus’ near-contemporary history. As in the original, Leonidas (_Phantom of the Opera_‘s Gerald Butler) goes to the swinish holy men, the Ephors, for permission to wage a defense against the million-man army of the Persian monarch Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro, from _Lost_). The oracle waffles, but Leonidas, saying he’s just going out for a stroll with his private guards, leaves his wife Gorgo (_The Brothers Grimm_‘s Lena Headey) and leads his loyal band to their desperate and storied destiny. He might have triumphed, if the homunculus Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan, from British TV) had not betrayed the Greeks and told Xerxes their strategy. All the famous lines are here: “Go tell the Spartans”; “Come and get us”; and the Spartan soldier’s deflection of the Persian threat, “Our arrows will blot out the sun” — he says, “Then we will fight in the shade.” Herodotus: damned fine screenwriter. Miller pictures Leonidas as a hero of Hestonian features (though Butler looks like a sturdier Soupy Sales). He gives a lot of cross-species personality to his villains. He draws the Ephors as pigmen with pigment. And Ephialtes is Miller’s Gollum: misshapen in body and mind, eager to please, susceptible to bribes. His battles are grandly realized, with dark splashes of Utrillo. The whole thing is the smartest rendering of a klassics komic book, which the movie basically dupes, down to the last frame. It’s a virtual Xerxes Xerox. **4\. The political and religious metaphors.** All right, _any_ movie, from _Happy Feet_ to _Hannibal Rising_, can be a metaphor for Iraq. But we’ll pass along the percolating argument that Leonidas is George W. Bush. In brief: Over the protests of the highest government (the Ephors or the U.N.), a commander-in-chief goes to war with an undersize army against a formidable Middle-Eastern power. All so he could say, as Leonidas does: “We rescued a world from mysticism and tyranny.” The authorities in Iran think the movie is about them, since their country is the descendant of ancient Persia. A cultural adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad charged the film with “plundering Iran’s historic past and insulting this civilization.” The newspaper Ayandeh-No ran the headline “Hollywood Declares War on Iranians, adding, that the movie “seeks to tell people that Iran, which is in the Axis of Evil now, has for long been the source of evil and modern Iranians’ ancestors are the ugly murderous dumb savages you see in _300_.” Mind you, the Spartans might also be the Iraqi insurgents, leaving their homes to repel a foreign invader. Or they could be seen as Greece’s private mercenary army initiating their own mischief: a Blackwater USA of the Aegean. Or Stephen Colbert, analyzing the movie on his show, could be onto something: that the wolf at the beginning of the film is the liberal press, various monsters are Nancy Pelosi and Tim Russert, and the Persian messenger whom Leonidas kicks over the edge of a deep well is Scooter Libby. More potent similarities can be found between _300_ and the R-rated film with the all-time highest opening-weekend gross. Consider: It’s the beyond-bloody saga of an ancient king who leads a high-minded rebellion against a corrupt hierarchy, who endures extraordinary physical abuse before dying nobly, and whose name has been praised throughout history. In other words, _300_ is _The Passion of the Christ_. BTW: In the original legend, Xerxes has Leonidas crucified. **5\. The look.** The movie is handsomely dark, like that spate of ’80s dystopian fantasy epics (_Blade Runner, The Keep, Labyrinth_). The sun really is blotted out; all the fights seem to take place at dusk. In fact, the whole movie looks awfully sooty. Maybe it’s really a commentary on the Industrial Revolution. When in doubt, any action film cranks down the action. Here, the bad guys swing their armaments in slo-mo, allowing the good guys to stab them in norm-mo. In one inspired sequence, the action stops as it traces the flight of an arrow, slicing it into separate panels on the screen — Zeno’s Arrow Paradox, in a fanboy movie! But the look is too often neutralized, made listless, by all the talk. There are many long dialogues, shot in Cyclopsian closeup. Trying to give the orations more heft, the actors shout them, often pausing after each sentence fragment — as Leonidas does in this iambic-pentameter invocation to his troops: “Eat hearty. For tonight. We dine, In hell.” **6\. The women.** A peplum epic demands a little female skin, and _300_ serves up a few glimpses of erect nipples, a few tableaux of women (and the odd hermaphrodite) in perfunctory writhing. The movie’s major difference from the book is in its portrait of Leonidas’ queen, Gorgo (who in Greek legend was also the daughter of the king’s half-brother). Miller, mesmerized by battle and honor, had little interest in the queen; she appears in just a few panels. The movie, true to the actual Spartan tradition of emancipated womanhood, promotes Gorgo (played with a kind of stalwart sensuality by Headey) to a co-starring role, allowing her to take fatal revenge on a wicked politician who had sodomized her. In the book, Leonidas thought Sparta was always an ideal worth dying for. In the movie, Gorgo’s beauty, strength and courage give him something to live for. Still, the movie Gorgo’s parting words to her husband aren’t exactly “Get home safe, honey.” Instead, a severe Spartette to the end, she says: “Come back with your shield. Or on it.” **7\. The men.** A Spartan boy is bred to militarism. He’s taken from his mother and, as the movie says, is “thrown into a world of unspeakable cruelty” (or, as the English call it, boarding school). Spartans are the tough guys, the bully boys, the warrior class, fighting and dying for other Greeks who may lack their mettle. Leonidas chides the Athenians as “those philosophers and boy-lovers.” Yet the movie is totally gay, a romp in Homer eroticism. Male body worship abounds; the actors, who seem pumped up on Hellenic growth hormones, hardly need shields or swords. Their pecks are their breastplate; their tumorous abs are their body armor. (Thee closing credits list _two_ “personal trainers to Mr. Butler, so I guess the muscles aren’t all CGI.) They boast and tease each other about their physiques, which to me sounds like flirting. At times these ancient bodybuilders look like their own statuary, heroic and sometimes headless. Even the Spartans’ nobility is homoneurotic. They rhapsodize about “a beautiful death,” and figure in military hagiography somewhere between Wagner’s Siegfried and the Third Reich’s S.S. (I mean that in a nice way.) “It’s an honor to die at you side,”one officer says toward the end to Leonidas, who replies, “It’s an honor to have lived at yours.” If this movie dialogue were between a man and a woman, I guarantee the audience would spill their popcorn in giggle fits. But the crowd I saw _300_ with suffered all this strained seriousness in respectful silence. In his last battle, Leonidas gets an enemy arrow in each tit, and soon he’s Xerxes’ pin cushion. The image may remind you of Saint Sebastian in a medieval painting, or Toshiro Mifune in Kurosawa’s _Throne of Blood_. To me it recalled some of the more extreme photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. I know nothing of the sexual orientation of Snyder or Miller. And I’m not criticizing, only describing, _300_‘s iconography. But I’m surprised by the movie’s broad appeal to the movie block of young American males, many of whom still use “gay” as the second-worst slur, and can still see homosexuality as something to laugh at or fear. Maybe the success of _300_ will encourage other, better, directors to make dead-serious movies on ancient-history subjects. And maybe, then, we’ll hear kids come out of the theater burbling, “I loved that movie, man! It was totally gay!” 7 Reasons Why 300 Is a Huge Hit ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6908181/7-reasons-why-300-is-a-huge-hit/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6908181/7-reasons-why-300-is-a-huge-hit/"},"headline":"7 Reasons Why 300 Is a Huge Hit","datePublished":"2007-03-14T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-22T15:20:53.074Z","description":"Like a bunch of super-butch Greeks storming Thermopylae, but with fewer casualties and a different ending, the no-star antique war drama 300 triumphed at the...","url":"https://time.com/archive/6908181/7-reasons-why-300-is-a-huge-hit/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltac61863ba6d02612/698a4a95db29874e7826a6e5/360_300_corliss_0313.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Richard Corliss","url":"https://time.com/author/richard-corliss/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltac61863ba6d02612/698a4a95db29874e7826a6e5/360_300_corliss_0313.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"360_300_corliss_0313.jpg","caption":"Leonidas, played by Gerald Butler, fights his way through the first wave of Persian infantry in the film 300.","creditText":"Warner Bros.","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/6908181/7-reasons-why-300-is-a-huge-hit/","name":"7 Reasons Why 300 Is a Huge Hit"}}]}] ```