Braveheart is the film that proved the historical epic could still work at scale, and Gladiator was greenlit into the space it made. Five years apart, both built on the same structure: a man with a family, the family destroyed by an empire, and a revolt that ends in the hero's death and a political change he does not live to see. The battle grammar carries too, handheld and mud-level rather than the wide formations of the 1960s epics. Filed MEDIUM. It is a commercial and formal inheritance rather than a stated one, and Gladiator's own citations are Roman history and The Fall of the Roman Empire.