“There was once a time when the physical barriers to world-creation on screen dictated a level of narrative justification for an epic scope. Were we to pinpoint the new age of “epic-ification,” we might place it somewhere in the post-Lord of the Rings/Star Wars prequels area. It was then, after audience expectations for visual effects were permanently altered, that Hollywood started to lose its grip on the relationship between narrative necessity and epic scope. Now that anything could be put on the screen, everything should, and in as massive a scale as possible.”

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