Responses to Oliver Stone’s Alexander: Film, History, and Cultural Studies

Blockbuster! Museum Responses to Alexander the Great

Blockbuster! Museum Responses to Alexander the Great john f. cherry Alexander as Blockbuster “Blockbuster: a term derived from the popular name of the huge German bombs used in World War II to blast large sections of a city; in the museum sense, it refers to a revolutionary, powerful exhibition” (Dean 1996, 159). Judged by all the usual measures, Oliver Stone’s film Alexander falls into the “blockbuster” category. As described in considerable detail by Robin Lane Fox in The Making of Alexander (2004), it entailed fifteen years of development and planning, a production budget of $160 million, and a Warner Bros. publicity campaign that spent $35 million in the United States alone. The construction of numerous lavish soundstages; outdoor, on-location filming in exotic locales (Morocco and Thailand); extended battle scenes on a vast scale involving thousands of extras and animals; a panoply of big-name Hollywood actors and actresses; a three-time Academy Award–winning director in overall charge—these things all add up to a blockbuster. The usual cycle of hype and anticipation led up to the U.S. opening on November 24, 2004, followed by the red-carpet celebrity premiere, the keen scrutiny of ticket sales during the opening weeks, and the gleeful tabulation of critical responses (some positive, but mostly fairly negative).1 And after 305 the general release, the predictable marketing followups: posters, T-shirts, the official guide to the movie, the release on DVD, the Director ’s Cut DVD, and the like. Blockbusters aim for maximum publicity in order to attract the maximum attendance, which is necessary to recoup the staggering costs of production. The very size of the anticipated viewing audience— augmented by those who, while not themselves paying to watch the movie, are nonetheless aware of a major cinematic event—affords enhanced commercial opportunities, and this can generate some significant and intriguing responses. One example must suffice here: the apparent impact of Stone’s Alexander on book publishing in related fields. Table 1 presents summary information, for the period from 2002 to 2006 (bracketing the movie’s release in 2004), about the numbers of published books of direct relevance to Alexander the Great. The data come from searches of the listings provided by Amazon.com and similar sources, and while hardly a scientific sample or even an exhaustive one, they provide a reasonably representative overview of changes during the period in question. The most obvious feature is the three- or fourfold increase in the total of books published in 2004, as compared with those in 2002 and 2003, with further growth by 50 percent in 2005. Since Alexander opened in the United States late in 2004 (on Thanksgiving weekend), it can be assumed that the majority of the books appearing in 2004 were planned specifically to take advantage of an anticipated spike of interest in all things to do with Alexander. Many of these books are reprints that reflect the publishers’ desire to squeeze additional revenue from existing titles in their lists: the impetus is most transparent in the case of Robin Lane Fox’s standard study Alexander the Great (1973), re-released in the month prior to Alexander’s opening and advertised as an “unofficial movie tie-in,” with an image from the movie and an endorsement by its director on the cover. A few newly written scholarly studies and biographies certainly make fresh contributions to the literature (e.g., Cartledge 2004; Rogers 2004), but the majority of publications are hackneyed retellings of Alexander’s expedition that offer little that is new. Most of the dozen new books written for children or the educational market appear to be strategically timed additions to ongoing series (“Dead Famous,” “Signature Lives,” “Heroes and Villains,” “Kids Who Ruled,” etc.), as do some of those aimed at adult readers (“Weekend Biographies,” “Great Empires of the Past,” “Ancient Lives,” “Rulers of the Ancient World,” etc.). Some books intended for a general readership, not surprisingly, play up 306 john f. cherry themes of likely wide appeal: sex (Chugg 2006), the “mystery” of Alexander’s death (Doherty 2004; Phillips 2005), the puzzle of his lost tomb (Chugg 2004; Saunders 2006), military history (Heckel 2003; Fuller 2004; Lonsdale 2004; Warry 2005; Lonsdale 2006; Heckel and Hook 2006), or—most bizarre of all—Alexander as a model for modern business strategists (Figueira et al. 2001; Bose 2003; Kurke 2004). Overall, one sees from this brief review of recent publishing...