10 Best Epic Films of the 2020s So Far, Ranked

Movie theaters spent most of the 2010s convinced nobody wanted to sit through a three-hour movie about ancient history or physics, and then this decade just started throwing them out anyway, one after another, and audiences actually showed up. Something shifted, whether it's directors finally getting the budget and trust to go big again, or people just wanting an actual story to leave the house for. These ten all commit to that scale completely. You will experience real armies, real deserts, real historical weight, a lot less CGI and a lot more thrill. There were packed theaters, IMAX screenings sold out weeks in advance, some of these made an absurd amount of money as well. So, let’s have a look at what you can watch with your family and friends this week, preferably on a big screen. 10 'The Northman' (2022) Image via Focus Features This is a revenge story stripped down to a primal, no modern moral commentary. It is about a Viking prince named Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) who watched his father get murdered as a kid and spends the rest of his life burning to get even. Robert Eggers researched actual Norse rituals and language so deeply that the movie sometimes feels like an anthropological reconstruction with a plot attached. Nicole Kidman plays his mother, and the twist involving her role in the original murder recontextualizes basically everything Amleth thought he knew about his own family. There's a single extended tracking shot during a village raid that never cuts away once, and it's brutal enough that you almost forget how technically difficult it must have been to actually pull off. 9 'Dune' (2021) Image via Warner Bros. Denis Villeneuve only adapted half of the original novel here, and the movie is confident enough in its own pacing to let that be the whole point, this is a setup, not a complete story, and it never pretends otherwise. Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) spends the film slowly realizing the weight of a destiny he never asked for, while his family gets set up by a political trap they don't see coming. Hans Zimmer's score leans on invented instruments and processed vocal chanting instead of a normal orchestra, and it makes the whole planet of Arrakis sound as alien as it looks. The sandworms were built using a mix of practical elements and digital work, and the scale of them on screen still creates a kind of dread that CGI monsters usually can't manage. 8 'RRR' (2022) Image via DVV Entertainment Two real historical Indian revolutionaries get reimagined here as fictional best friends who don't yet know they're on opposing sides of the same fight against British colonial rule, and the film uses that friendship to build some of the most purely joyful, over-the-top action sequences ever put on screen. At one point a man lifts a motorcycle over his head and fights off a truck full of soldiers with it. S.S. Rajamouli directs a three-hour movie that does not feel like it's dragging, because there's a real emotional core underneath everything, two men who actually love each other like brothers. The musical number "Naatu Naatu" won the Oscar for Best Original Song, and it deserves that just by being one of the most purely fun dance sequences in any movie from this decade. 7 'Killers of the Flower Moon' (2023) Image via Paramount Pictures/Apple TV+ This is based on the real murders of Osage Nation members in the 1920s, killed for the oil rights under their own land, and Martin Scorsese restructured the whole project midway through development to focus on the toxic marriage at the center of it. Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) marries Mollie (Lily Gladstone), an Osage woman, while quietly helping orchestrate the murder of her own family members for money. William Hale (Robert De Niro) plays the local power broker pulling most of the strings, presenting himself publicly as a friend to the Osage people while doing the exact opposite behind closed doors. The film runs three and a half hours, and it uses almost every minute of it to show how slow and how normalized this kind of violence actually was at the time. 6 'The Batman' (2022) Image via Warner Bros. This version of Batman (Robert Pattinson) barely feels like a superhero movie at all, it plays closer to a grim detective noir with a guy in a bat costume following clues left behind by a serial killer. Matt Reeves almost the entire film soaked in rain and shadow, and Nirvana's "Something in the Way" becomes this recurring, mournful theme that fits a billionaire orphan better than any triumphant superhero score ever has. The Riddler (Paul Dano), styled like an internet conspiracy, and he ends up being disturbing to the core. Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz) gives the movie its only real warmth, and at just under three hours, the film never feels bloated, because it commits so fully to its own mood without trying to rush toward the next action beat. 5 'Napoleon' (2023) Image via Apple TV+ Ridley Scott stages the Battle of Austerlitz around a frozen lake that cracks apart under retreating soldiers, and when historians pointed out how inaccurate parts of the movie are, Scott's public response was basically to ask if they were personally there to know better. Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) comes across like an awkward, insecure man who happens to be extremely good at war. Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) gets just as much focus as any of the battles, and their relationship, obsessive and strange in equal measure, ends up being the actual emotional throughline of the movie. An extended cut released later runs almost an hour longer than the theatrical version, and it fills in a lot of character motivation the shorter cut leaves oddly blank. 4 'Gladiator II' (2024) Image via Paramount Pictures This one is by Ridley Scott as well. He waited over two decades to make this sequel, and the wait shows how confident he was with the script. The storyline has a Colosseum naval battle stocked with actual sharks, based loosely on real Roman naval reenactments but pushed into something far more ridiculous on purpose. Lucius (Paul Mescal) gets revealed as Maximus's son partway through, which ties the whole story directly back to the original film. Macrinus (Denzel Washington) steals nearly every scene he's in as a former slave turned power broker who's clearly enjoying every second of manipulating people around him. General Acacius (Pedro Pascal) provides most of the film's actual moral conflict, a soldier who's grown tired of an empire he still has to serve, and the film is at its best whenever it slows down enough to let him actually wrestle with that. 3 'Dune: Part Two' (2024) Image via Warner Bros. Pictures The Harkonnen homeworld gets shot entirely under a black sun using infrared camera techniques, turning the whole gladiator arena sequence into stark black and white with occasional flashes of white fire. It's one of the most visually striking things in any blockbuster this decade. Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) shows up in that arena as the most purely terrifying antagonist the franchise has had so far, shaved head, dead eyes, and an eerie stillness to every move he makes. Paul (Timothée Chalamet) rides his first sandworm in a sequence built almost entirely with practical rigs instead of CGI, and you can feel the actual physical strain in how the scene is shot. Denis Villeneuve finishes adapting the first novel here, and the back half of the story turns considerably darker than the first movie let on, prophecy, holy war, and the cost of becoming exactly the kind of leader Paul always said he didn't want to be. 2 'Oppenheimer' (2023) Image via Universal Pictures Christopher Nolan shot large sections of this movie on a specially developed black-and-white IMAX film stock that had never been used for a feature before, splitting the story between Oppenheimer's (Cillian Murphy) subjective color timeline and a colder, black-and-white timeline following Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) years later. The Trinity test detonation was built entirely with practical effects, no CGI, and the sequence still manages to feel frightening as hell. Nolan structures the whole three-hour runtime like a slow-building courtroom drama. He jumps between timelines until everything Oppenheimer helped create finally catches up with him. It swept nearly every major award that year, and unlike a lot of awards-season sweeps, people go back and rewatch it, which isn't something you can say about most three-hour dramas about physics and government. 1 'The Odyssey' (2026) Image via Universal Pictures Another one of Nolan’s masterpieces. He actually follows up Oppenheimer with a straight adaptation of Homer's actual epic poem, and he shot the entire thing on IMAX film cameras, no digital cutaways anywhere in the mix. Odysseus (Matt Damon) spends the whole story trying to get home after the Trojan War ends, while his son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), grows increasingly desperate back in Ithaca as suitors circle his mother, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), assuming his father is already dead. Athena (Zendaya) guides Telemachus toward proof that his father's still alive, and Antinous (Robert Pattinson), the most aggressive of Penelope's suitors, spends the back half of the movie plotting to have Telemachus killed before Odysseus can make it home to stop him. The film made over a billion and a half dollars worldwide and pulled in some of the strongest reviews of Nolan's career, proof that a three-hour movie based on a three-thousand-year-old poem can still turn into the biggest event of the summer.