Now that the radioactive fallout from Oppenheimer’s detonation is starting to settle, and the mushroom cloud that was Barbenheimer has drifted away on the breeze, it’s a bit easier to see the whole thing for what it was. Christopher Nolan has made a good film, and loads of people went to see it at the cinema, and so far it’s made north of $725 million on a $100 million budget. Happy days, whichever way you slice it.

Leave aside the typically Nolanesque time-scrambling narratives and Oppenheimer is, in a lot of ways, a blast from the past. It’s a war story packed with stars, led by a prestige director and hotly tipped for awards season. You’ve seen a hundred of ‘em. They’re BBC4 fodder. Yet Oppenheimer – in a quite Nolan-y twist – might also be the future too.

Oppenheimer hasn’t started a trend, but it’s the first of a run of historical epics which could turn out to be blockbusters like it has become. Ridley Scott continues his ridiculously productive eighties with a biopic of Napoleon Bonaparte, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the general and Vanessa Kirby as his wife Joséphine. When it was announced Scott said he’d always been fascinated by the French emperor. “He came out of nowhere to rule everything – but all the while he was waging a romantic war with his adulterous wife Joséphine,” Scott said. “He conquered the world to try to win her love, and when he couldn't, he conquered it to destroy her, and destroyed himself in the process.”

He’s also working on Gladiator 2 with (Esquire's newest cover star) Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal, which should be gigantic. They’re all about different times and different ideas, and their attitudes toward actual history range from painstakingly researched to a broad feeling for vibes. And, really, the historical epic never went away. But it feels like it’s back as one of the pillars of Big Event Movies after some time gathering dust in the archives.

There’s a distinction here between a historical epic and a period drama. A period drama plops a story and characters into a time and place in a few specific bits of the past: the whole of the 20th century is up for grabs, plus the grottier bits of the nineteenth, the fancier bits of the early 18th, and Shakespearean London. A historical epic is less about using a time and place as a setting and more about using it as an engine for the story. Gladiator might be fictional, but it’s the heaving tides of history that take Maximus Decimus Meridius from the front lines of the war against Germanic tribes to North Africa and back to Rome.

But more than anything, it’s about the size of the ideas. Period dramas tend to be drawn on a smaller scale while historical epics reach for something timeless and gigantic. For instance: Oppenheimer broke apart the fundamental matter of the universe and made it possible for humanity to destroy itself; Pearl Harbor was more interested in blowing things up. One is an epic, the other is Pearl Harbor.

We’re in the middle of one of the occasional booms in historical movies. Last year there was The Woman King and All Quiet on the Western Front, both of which made their mark – the latter won seven Baftas including Best Film – but along with musicals they’re a type of movie that have been popular as long as there’s been movies.

The late Twenties and Thirties were a golden age: between 1929 and 1939, six of the 10 Best Picture Oscar winners were historical epics. They were big through the early Sixties too: the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton Cleopatra bombed but was a massive story, while Ben-Hur, Spartacus, El Cid and Lawrence of Arabia were huge hits.

You can see the appeal for filmmakers and studios: some of these stories are so embedded within the culture that everyone roughly knows what they’re getting themselves into beforehand. Making a movie about Napoleon – or Hitler, or Henry VIII, or Helen of Troy – makes marketing a breeze. It’s the historical equivalent of making another Expendables. You know where you are.

So why are they back now? Well, on one level, they might not actually be back. This might be two Ridley Scott films and a Chris Nolan film landing in the same 18-month period, to the power of a one-off grassroots cross-promotional meme-storm. This isn’t like the boom in biopics about products and brands. It’s not like every streamer is going to be able to join the rush by running to one of Britain’s A-list directors and getting them to knock together a biopic of Charlemagne.

I think there’s certainly something to the excitement which Oppenheimer, Napoleon and Gladiator 2 have generated though. They’re all likely to be very serious films with designs on big awards, and though the stock of historical movies goes up and down it’s rare that there’s a year when not a single one is nominated for the Best Picture Oscar – it was 2009 last time that happened. But none of those movies challenged the top 10 of the biggest grossing movies in their years. You’ve got to go back to The Last Samurai in 2003 for the last historical movie to make the global top 10. As it stands, Oppenheimer is fourth in the 2023 list.

Oppenheimer strikes a noticeably grown-up tone for a Big Event Movie to take after a good 15 years where most of the Big Event Movies have either been from Marvel or the world of Avatar. In fact, movies like Oppenheimer are the exact opposite of the huge hits we’ve gradually become blasé about. Not every movie can be an event, but as the various multiverses unravel, there’s hope in the fact that stories told inventively by skilled directors have shown they can get people buying cinema tickets and talking about movies. We’re not looking at a chain reaction here, but a spark which might catch light.