What really defines an 'epic movie'?

...I would suggest that one definition would be any film that spans a specific length of time and/or events. For example, How the West Was Won...

In addition to what the other poster mentioned: money. The whole blockbuster mentality can be traced back to the 1950s when Hollywood had responded to declining cinema attendances and the emergence of TV as a rival mass entertainment medium by turning to spectacular biblical and ancient world epics produced on a scale that television could never match (except for the odd miniseries, The Pillars of the Earth, etc.)

Originally epics were defined as tales or oral traditions of folk heroes, usually pertaining to the founding of a a nation or people or a major event in the history of a given group. From a cinematic standpoint, it's a historical film which depicts a large portion of time and a large swath of events but focuses on one main protagonist, termed a hero according to tradition. Cinematic epics have been defined across many time periods including El Cid, Exodus, The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, etc.



People hate and fear what they don't understand...especially on IMDb

That's a tricky one. Let's start by looking at a few titles that come to mind when we think of epics:
-Lawrence of Arabia
-The Ten Commandments
-Gandhi
-Once Upon a Time in the West
-Once Upon a Time in America
-How the West Was Won
-Barry Lyndon
-Spartacus

Now what do all these films have in common? Well, for one thing they're all incredibly long (most of them come close to being three hours long, and some even go past that). Is that what makes an epic?

I don't think so. Apocalypse Now comes close to that length (somewhere around three hours in the theatrical release, nearly four in the redux), yet I don't normally hear it referred to as an epic. What about Dances with Wolves, The Big Country, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Gettysburg, or Patton? All of these are the right length and yet they're not seen as epics.

A lot of them are period pieces with historical settings. Many of them follow historical events or use them as a backdrop for a fictional story. Logically this might mean that epics are based on history. Nonetheless, you could argue that this isn't the case seeing as The Ten Commandments is in fact based on religion.


If Clint Eastwood and Chuck Norris got into a fight, Clint Eastwood would probably win.