Retelling the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, 300 stars Gerard Butler as Leonidas, warrior king of Sparta. When messengers from Persia demand tokens of submission to their emperor Xerxes, Leonidas kills them and vows to fight back against the invading army. With 300 of his best soldiers, Leonidas cleaves his way through the Persian army, all while being vastly outnumbered. While Queen Gorgo tries to rally reinforcements at home, Leonidas holds back the Persian army in the Hot Gates, but an unexpected betrayal forces the Spartans to fight their enemies down to their very last man.

300 exists as a perfect synthesis of two visionary minds: artist Frank Miller and director Zack Snyder. Acclaimed for his dark reimaginings of Batman and Daredevil in the 1980s, Miller wrote and drew 300 as a miniseries for Dark Horse Comics in 1998, with colors by Lynn Varley. The story of Leonidas and his army had been branded into Miller’s brain at a young age, when he saw the 1963 film The 300 Spartans. King Leonidas even appears in the booze-and-bullets world of Miller’s Sin City; in “The Big Fat Kill” hero Dwight recounts the Battle of Thermopylae as an example of courage in the face of impossible odds. Drawn entirely in two-page spreads, 300 had a cinematic style that was ripe for adaptation, long before comic creators began treating their books as elevator pitches for movies. After Miller co-directed Sin City with Robert Rodriguez in 2005, winning acclaim for a unique visual style that transmuted comic imagery directly into live action, there was reason to believe that Miller would be a major Hollywood presence for a long time.