The creation of a Hollywood movie started with a question on Reddit: Could a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus?

The head-scratcher of a query, posted to the site in 2011, amassed nearly 4,000 comments and got military historian James Erwin thinking about the answer. Erwin was so intrigued that he sat down during his lunch break and wrote a short story based on the question. By end of day, Erwin had 250,000 visitors reading his blog post "Rome, Sweet Rome."

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Erwin told The Financial Times that within a week he had a Beverly Hills-based agent and a contract with Warner Bros. Hollywood tossed "a pretty obscene amount of money" (as Erwin described it) his way to write a screenplay based on his initial post.

The Redditor turned Hollywood writer returned to his job as a technical writer after completing the screenplay. According to FT, he's currently working on a nove, which he hopes to fund with a Kickstarter campaign.

Image via iStockphoto, Kurtz Creative