Via Cox & Forkum
The ancient battle of Thermopylae was the stuff of 2007’s first certified blockbuster as the bloody action tale “300″ debuted with $70 million over opening weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday.
That’s about $233,000 for every one of the legendary 300 Spartan soldiers who fought off a much larger Persian force in the epic battle.
“On a Spartan-by-Spartan basis, that’s a lot of money,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. “Summer came a little early, because this is a summer-style opening.”
The number of movie-goers for the Warner Bros. epic “300″ outnumbered crowds for the rest of the top-10 movies combined. If the estimate holds when final numbers are released Monday, “300″ would break the record for best March debut ever, topping the $68 million haul for “Ice Age: The Meltdown” last year.
“300″ played in 3,103 theaters, about 850 fewer than the “Ice Age” sequel, making its box-office performance even more notable. The movie averaged $22,567 a theater, a whopping number for a wide release.
The total for “300″ includes $3.4 million from 62 IMAX theaters, a record opening weekend for the large-screen format.
Buoyed by “300″ and some solid holdovers, Hollywood business soared, with the top-12 movies taking in $139.4 million, up 49 percent from the same weekend last year.
The Western ideal of fighting for freedom at all costs and against all odds is traced back to the ancient battle of Thermopylae in which the free Greeks fought against the overwhelming hordes of Persians. Some history of the battle can be found here: History and the Movie “300†by Victor Davis Hanson
So almost immediately, contemporary Greeks saw Thermopylae as a critical moral and culture lesson. In universal terms, a small, free people had willingly outfought huge numbers of imperial subjects who advanced under the lash. More specifically, the Western idea that soldiers themselves decide where, how, and against whom they will fight was contrasted against the Eastern notion of despotism and monarchy  freedom proving the stronger idea as the more courageous fighting of the Greeks at Thermopylae, and their later victories at Salamis and Plataea attested.
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But most importantly, 300 preserves the spirit of the Thermopylae story. The Spartans, quoting lines known from Herodotus and themes from the lyric poets, profess unswerving loyalty to a free Greece. They will never kow-tow to the Persians, preferring to die on their feet than live on their knees.
If critics think that 300 reduces and simplifies the meaning of Thermopylae into freedom versus tyranny, they should reread carefully ancient accounts and then blame Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diodorus  who long ago boasted that Greek freedom was on trial against Persian autocracy, free men in superior fashion dying for their liberty, their enslaved enemies being whipped to enslave others.
