Box office 300 was released in North America on March 9, 2007, in both conventional and IMAX theaters. It grossed $28,106,731 on its opening day and ended its North American opening weekend with $70,885,301, breaking the record held by
Ice Age: The Meltdown for the biggest opening weekend in the month of March and for a spring release. Since then
300s spring release record was broken by
Fast and Furious and
300s March record was broken by
Tim Burton's
Alice in Wonderland.
300 opening weekend gross is the 24th-highest in box office history, coming slightly below
The Lost World: Jurassic Park but higher than
Transformers. It was the third-biggest opening for an R-rated film ever, behind
The Matrix Reloaded ($91.8 million) and
The Passion of the Christ ($83.8 million). The film also set a record for
IMAX cinemas with a $3.6 million opening weekend. The film grossed $468,879,361 worldwide.
300 opened two days earlier, on March 7, 2007, in
Sparta, and across Greece on March 8.
Studio executives were surprised by the showing, which was twice what they had expected. They credited the film's stylized violence, the strong female role of Queen Gorgo which attracted a large number of women, and a
MySpace advertising blitz. Producer Mark Canton said, "MySpace had an enormous impact but it has transcended the limitations of the Internet or the graphic novel. Once you make a great movie, word can spread very quickly." It had been panned at a press screening hours earlier, where many attendees left during the showing and those who remained booed at the end. As of July 2024, on
Rotten Tomatoes, the film had an approval rating of 61% based on 238 reviews, with an
average rating of 6.10/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "A simple-minded but visually exciting experience, full of blood, violence, and ready-made movie quotes." As of October 2020, on
Metacritic, the film had a
weighted average score of 52 out of 100, based on 42 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by
CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale. Some of the most unfavorable reviews came from major
American newspapers.
A. O. Scott of
The New York Times described
300 as "about as violent as
Apocalypto and twice as stupid", and he also criticized its
color scheme and suggested that its plot includes
racist undertones; Scott also poked fun at the buffed bodies of the actors who portrayed the Spartans, declaring that the Persian characters are "pioneers in the art of face-piercing", and declaring that the actors who played the Spartans had access to "superior health clubs and electrolysis facilities".
Kenneth Turan wrote in the
Los Angeles Times that "unless you love violence as much as a Spartan,
Quentin Tarantino or a
video-game-playing teenage boy, you will not be endlessly fascinated".
Roger Ebert gave the film a 2 out of 4 rating, writing that "
300 has one-dimensional caricatures who talk like
professional wrestlers plugging their next feud". Some critics employed at
Greek newspapers have been particularly critical, such as film critic Robby Eksiel, who said that moviegoers would be dazzled by the "digital action" but also feel irritated by the "pompous interpretations and one-dimensional characters".
Varietys Todd McCarthy described the film as "visually arresting" although "bombastic" while Kirk Honeycutt, writing in
The Hollywood Reporter, praised the "beauty of its
topography, colors and forms". Writing in the
Chicago Sun-Times,
Richard Roeper acclaimed
300 as "the
Citizen Kane of cinematic graphic novels".
Empire gave the film three out of five, writing, "Visually stunning, thoroughly belligerent and as shallow as a
pygmy's paddling pool, this is a whole heap of style tinged with just a smidgen of substance."
Comic Book Resources Mark Cronan found the film compelling, leaving him "with a feeling of power, from having been witness to something grand".
IGNs Todd Gilchrist acclaimed Zack Snyder as a cinematic visionary and "a possible redeemer of modern moviemaking".
Accolades At the
2007 MTV Movie Awards,
300 was nominated for
Best Movie,
Best Performance for Gerard Butler,
Best Breakthrough Performance for Lena Headey,
Best Villain for
Rodrigo Santoro, and
Best Fight for Leonidas battling "the Über Immortal", but only won the award for Best Fight.
300 won both the Best Dramatic Film and Best Action Film honors in the 2006–2007 Golden Icon Awards presented by Travolta Family Entertainment. In December 2007,
300 won
IGNs Movie of the Year 2007, along with Best Comic Book Adaptation and King Leonidas as Favorite Character. The movie received 10 nominations for the 2008
Saturn Awards, winning the awards for
Best Director and
Best Action/Adventure/Thriller Film. In 2009,
National Review magazine ranked
300 number five on its 25 "Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years" list.
Historical accuracy In the actual
Battle of Thermopylae, the Spartans had already joined an alliance with other Greek
poleis against the Persians. During the Battle of Thermopylae,
Xerxes's invasion of Greece coincided with a Spartan religious festival, the
Carneia, in which the Spartans were not permitted to make war. Still, realizing the threat of the Persians and not wanting to appear as Persian sympathizers, the Spartan government, rather than Leonidas alone, decided to send Leonidas with his personal 300-strong bodyguard to Thermopylae. Other Greek poleis joined the 300 Spartan men and totaled somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 total Greek troops. The historical consensus among both ancient chroniclers and current scholars was that Thermopylae was a clear Greek defeat, and the Persian invasion would be pushed back only in later ground and naval battles. Since few records on the actual martial arts used by the Spartans survive aside from accounts of formations and tactics, the fight choreography, led by the stunt coordinator and fight choreographer Damon Caro, was a synthesis of different weapon arts with
Filipino martial arts as the base.
Paul Cartledge, Professor of
Greek History at
Cambridge University, advised the filmmakers on the
pronunciation of Greek names and said that they "made good use" of his published work on Sparta. He praised the film for its portrayal of "the Spartans' heroic code" and of "the key role played by women in backing up, indeed reinforcing, the male martial code of heroic honour", but he expressed reservations about its "'
West' (goodies) vs '
East' (baddies) polarization". Cartledge wrote that he enjoyed the film but found Leonidas' description of the
Athenians as "
boy lovers" ironic since the Spartans themselves incorporated
institutional pederasty into their educational system. Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of Hellenistic history at the
University of Toronto, said that
300 selectively idealized Spartan society in a "problematic and disturbing" fashion and portrayed the "hundred nations of the Persians" as monsters and non-Spartan Greeks as weak. He suggested that the film's moral universe would have seemed "as bizarre to
ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians". Lytle also commented, "
Ephialtes, who betrays the Greeks, is likewise changed from a local
Malian of sound body into a Spartan outcast, a grotesquely disfigured
troll who by Spartan custom should have been left exposed as an infant to die. Leonidas points out that his hunched back means Ephialtes cannot lift his shield high enough to fight in the phalanx. This is a transparent defense of Spartan
eugenics, and convenient given that
infanticide could as easily have been precipitated by an ill-omened birthmark." He also said that the film portrays the battle in a "
surreal" manner and that the intent was to "entertain and shock first, and instruct second".
Touraj Daryaee, who is now Baskerville Professor of Iranian History and the Persian World at the
University of California, Irvine, criticized the film's use of classical sources by writing: Some passages from the Classical authors Aeschylus,
Diodorus, Herodotus and
Plutarch are spilt over the movie to give it an authentic flavor. Aeschylus becomes a major source when the battle with the "monstrous human herd" of the Persians is narrated in the film. Diodorus' statement about Greek valor to preserve their liberty is inserted in the film, but his mention of Persian valor is omitted. Herodotus' fanciful numbers are used to populate the Persian army, and Plutarch's discussion of
Greek women, specifically
Spartan women, is inserted wrongly in the dialogue between the "
misogynist" Persian ambassador and the Spartan king. Classical sources are certainly used, but exactly in all the wrong places, or quite naively. The Athenians were fighting a sea battle during this.
Robert McHenry, the former editor-in-chief of
Encyclopædia Britannica and the author of
How to Know, said that the film "is an almost ineffably silly movie. Stills from the film could easily be used to promote
Buns of Steel, or AbMaster, or
ThighMaster. It's about the romanticizing of the Spartan 'ideal', a process that began even in ancient times, was promoted by the
Romans, and has survived over time while less and less resembling the actual historical Sparta." Snyder stated in an
MTV interview that "the events are 90 percent accurate. It's just in the visualization that it's crazy.... I've shown this movie to world-class historians who have said it's amazing. They can't believe it's as accurate as it is." Nevertheless, he also said the film is "an opera, not a documentary. That's what I say when people say it's historically inaccurate." He was also quoted in a
BBC News story as saying that the film is, at its core "a
fantasy film". He also describes the film's narrator, Dilios, as "a guy who knows how not to wreck a good story with truth".
Kaveh Farrokh, in the paper "The 300 Movie: Separating Fact from Fiction", noted that the film falsely portrayed "the
Greco-Persian Wars in binary terms: the
democratic, good, rational 'Us' versus the tyrannical, evil and irrational, '
other' of the ever-nebulous (if not exotic) '
Persia'". He highlighted three points regarding the contribution of the
Achaemenid Empire to the creation of democracy and human rights: "The founder of the Achaemenid Empire,
Cyrus the Great, was the world's first emperor to
openly declare and guarantee the sanctity of human rights and individual freedom.... Cyrus was a follower of the teachings of
Zoroaster, the founder of
one of the world's oldest monotheistic religions.... When Cyrus defeated King
Nabonidus of
Babylon, he
officially declared the freedom of the
Jews from their
Babylonian captivity. This was the first time in history that a world power had guaranteed the survival of the
Jewish people,
religion,
customs and
culture." He abolished
slavery.
General criticism Before the release of
300, Warner Bros. expressed concerns about the political aspects of the film's theme. Snyder relates that there was "a huge sensitivity about East versus West with the studio". Media speculation about a possible parallel between the Greco-Persian conflict and current events began in an interview with Snyder that was conducted before the Berlin Film Festival. The interviewer remarked that "everyone is sure to be translating this [film] into contemporary politics". Snyder replied that he was aware that people would read the film through the lens of current events, but no parallels the film and the modern world were intended. Outside current political parallels, some critics have raised more general questions about the film's ideological orientation.
Slates
Dana Stevens compared the film to
The Eternal Jew (1940) "as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war. Since it's a product of the post-ideological, post-
Xbox 21st century,
300 will instead be talked about as a technical achievement, the next blip on the increasingly blurry line between movies and video games." Roger Moore, a critic for the
Orlando Sentinel, relates
300 to
Susan Sontag's definition of "
fascist art". Indeed, the
Lambda sign on the Spartans' shields in
300 formed the inspiration for the official symbol of the
far-right Identitarian movement.
Newsday critic Gene Seymour, on the other hand, stated that such reactions are misguided, writing that "the movie's just too darned silly to withstand any
ideological theorizing". Snyder himself dismissed ideological readings, suggesting that reviewers who critique "a graphic novel movie about a bunch of guys... stomping the snot out of each other" using words like "'
neocon', '
homophobic', '
homoerotic' or 'racist'" are "missing the point". Snyder, however, also admitted to fashioning an
effeminate villain specifically to make young
straight males in the audience uncomfortable: "What's more scary to a 20-year-old boy than a giant god-king who wants to
have his way with you?" The Slovenian critic
Slavoj Žižek pointed out that the story represents "a poor, small country (Greece)
invaded by the army of a much large[r] state (Persia)" and suggested the identification of the Spartans with a modern
superpower to be flawed. The writer Frank Miller said: "The Spartans were a
paradoxical people. They were the biggest
slave owners in Greece. But at the same time, Spartan women had an unusual level of rights. It's a paradox that they were a bunch of people who in many ways were fascist, but they were the bulwark against the fall of democracy. The closest comparison you can draw in terms of our own military today is to think of the red-caped Spartans as being like our
special-ops forces. They're these almost superhuman characters with a tremendous
warrior ethic, who were unquestionably the best fighters in Greece. I didn't want to render Sparta in overly accurate terms, because ultimately I do want you to root for the Spartans. I couldn't show them being quite as cruel as they were. I made them as cruel as I thought a modern audience could stand." Frank Miller, commenting on areas in which he lessened the Spartan cruelty for
narrative purposes, said: "I have King Leonidas very gently tell Ephialtes, the hunchback, that they can't use him [as a soldier], because of his deformity. It would be much more classically Spartan if Leonidas laughed and kicked him off the cliff." denounced the film. Some scenes in the film portray
demon-like and other fictional creatures as part of the Persian army, and the fictionalized portrayal of Persian King Xerxes I has been criticised as
effeminate. Critics suggested that it was meant to stand in stark contrast to the portrayed masculinity of the Spartan army.
Steven Rea argued that the film's Persians were a vehicle for an
anachronistic cross-section of Western aspirational stereotypes of
Asian and
African cultures. The film's portrayal of ancient Persians caused a particularly strong reaction in
Iran. Various Iranian officials condemned the film. The
Iranian Academy of the Arts submitted a formal complaint against the film to
UNESCO that called it an attack on the historical identity of Iran. The Iranian mission to the
United Nations protested the film in a
press release, and Iranian embassies protested its screening in France, Thailand, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. The film was
banned in Iran, with it being considered
American propaganda. Reviewers in the United States and elsewhere "noted the political overtones of the West-against-Iran story line and the way Persians are depicted as
decadent, sexually flamboyant and evil in contrast to the noble Greeks". With black market copies of the film already available in
Tehran with the film's international release and news of the film's surprising success at the US
box office, the film prompted widespread anger in Iran.
Azadeh Moaveni of
Time reported, "All of Tehran was outraged. Everywhere I went yesterday, the talk vibrated with indignation over the film." Newspapers in Iran featured headlines such as "Hollywood Declares War on Iranians" and "300 Against 70 Million", the latter being the size of Iran's population.
Ayende-No, an independent Iranian newspaper, said, "The film depicts Iranians as demons, without culture, feeling or humanity, who think of nothing except attacking other nations and killing people." and a group of Iranian film makers submitted a letter of protest to UNESCO regarding the film's misrepresentation of Iranian history and culture. The cultural advisor to
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the film an "American attempt for
psychological warfare against Iran". Moaveni identified two factors that may have contributed to the intensity of Iranian indignation over the film. Firstly, she described the timing of the film's release, on the eve of
Nowruz, the Persian New Year, as "inauspicious". Secondly, Iranians tend to view the era depicted in the film as "a particularly noble page in their history". Moaveni suggested that
300s box office success compared with
Alexanders failure (another spurious period epic dealing with Persians), was "cause for considerable alarm, signaling ominous U.S. intentions". According to
The Guardian, Iranian critics of
300, ranging from bloggers to government officials, described the movie "as a calculated attempt to demonise Iran at a time of intensifying U.S. pressure over the country's nuclear programme". An Iranian government spokesman described the film as "hostile behavior which is the result of cultural and psychological warfare". Moaveni reported that the Iranians with whom she interacted were "adamant that the movie was secretly funded by the
U.S. government to prepare Americans for going to
war against Iran". ==In popular culture==