Ridley Scott and History on the Big Screen: A Quantitative View

Recently discussing Ridley Scott's track record as a maker of historical epics I went with my own impressions of his movies, and what seemed to me the views of the professional critics, both in their generality and the remarks of a specific few I think more incisive than the rest. Subsequently it occurred to me to check out what the numbers on Rotten Tomatoes say about the matter regarding those films I think qualify as such epics (1492, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood, Exodus, The Last Duel and now Napoleon).

Where those films are concerned the single most poorly reviewed movie was the Biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings, with a thoroughly "rotten" 31 percent score, while the Columbus quincentennial film 1492: Conquest of Paradise was only marginally better reviewed, with a 32 percent score, and Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood got only slightly better scores than that (40 and 44 percent, respectively). At the other end of the spectrum Gladiator got a "fresh" 79 percent score, and The Last Duel, if a far weaker box office performer than Gladiator, actually got the best score of the lot (85 percent).

By that standard Napoleon, with its 50 percent score, would rank as one of Scott's stronger efforts. Still, it seems worth acknowledging that the critics, going by the score aggregator, have got a lot more generous in their appraisals over the years. In spite of the complete lack of evidence that movies have got better over the time frame (and I think, plenty of room to argue they have got worse), the average score for a wide (1000+ theater) release jumped 15 percent between 1998-2009 and the first three-quarters of 2019 (from 44 to 59 percent)--while that can in cases look like an underestimate. (Consider the 40-point gap in the scores critics gave Top Gun in 1986 and the scores critics gave Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, even though they were "basically the same movie," even in the view of many of their admirers.) If one subtracts 15 percent from Napoleon's score then one ends up with a score of 35 percent--putting the film all the way down with the Columbus movie and company, near the bottom of the list.

Will history bear out that judgment? We'll see in the years ahead--perhaps, by seeing that no one is seeing the Napoleon movie at all.