Pressfield had worked as a screenwriter creating disposable action-movie scripts for the likes of Steven Seagal and Dolph Lundgren in the late 1980s and early 1990s before writing his first novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, which was adapted into the Will Smith film of the same name. Released the same year as Miller’s graphic novel, Steven Pressfield’s more conventional historical novel, Gates of Fire, took its name from the eponymous battlefield, Thermopylae (referred to in 300 as ‘the hot gates’). A rival project based on a different literary source was also in the running to bring the Battle of Thermopylae – where a tiny Greek force held out for three days against an immense Persian invasion in 480BC – to the big screen the film that could have been Michael Mann’s Gates of Fire. Its mix of ancient history, comic-book iconography and sound-bite dialogue immediately found its way into the verbal and visual lexicon of contemporary pop culture but things could have been very different.

Zack Snyder’s 300, based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel of the same name, defied audience and studio expectations when it stormed the box office with Spartan-like ferocity back in 2007.

Gates of fire spartan