I want a return of the Bright Theatrical Historical/Biblical Epic

In the vain of DeMille's The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur and Quo Vadis and yes even the oft maligned Cleopatra staring Elizabeth Taylor.

I even love some of the lower budget examples of this genre, like The Robe and Demetrius and The Gladiators, or Solomon and Sheba, or really obscure ones like The Story of Ruth, The Prodigal and The Silver Chalice.  Also Richard Burton's Alexander The Great and The 300 Spartans.  Not to mention the related Sword & Sandal aka Peplum films made in Italy in the 50s and 60s.

There are still movies being made about History and The Bible, but everyone wants to make them Gritty and "Realistic" now, or occasionally a weird 300 approach, likewise with stuff based on Greek Mythology or Arthurian Legend (and yes I consider Wonder Woman part of this).  I guess they think audiences can't take that older approach seriously anymore, and yet with the Comic Book Superhero genre at least some are learning that the dark and gritty approach has a limited appeal and audiences do love bright colorful fun films as shown by the praise of Guardians of The Galaxy and how 2008's Speed Racer has been vindicated.

I don't exactly want new films to look indistinguishable from how they did back then, the technological advancements of the industry should be taken advantage of.  I'm fine with using CGI for the crowds so we no longer need to pay for a literal "cast of thousands".  And I like that now we can do more justice to the actual battles then they ever did.

What I want to see is a similar spirit or tone.  The SciFi Dune miniserieses and the Star Wars films show that that older theatrical style of acting can still be enjoyed by audiences, in fact the Thor movies have also been similar in that regard, influencing parts of the Avengers films.

In fact The Lord of The Rings films are comparable to what a modern version of this genre might look like, though I'd prefer a brighter color pallet.  Just avoid the pitfalls of The Hobbit films (though I still enjoy plenty of stuff in those).

But what really makes those old Epics not comparable to modern Blockbusters is their length.  Superhero films and Star Wars films are generally 2 or 2 and a half hours, with occasionally a cut approaching 3 hours getting a DVD release later.  It takes a Tolkien adaptation to warrant getting a 3 hour theatrical release.  It took the insane business The Dark Knight did to allow Nolan to get 2 hours and 40 minutes for Rises.

Well here's the thing, the cheaper end of those above films didn't have as long of a length.  The super long ones were typically like that because they were kind of trying to chronicle someone's entire life.  So as much as I personally want more 3 hour theatrical films, this genre can be recreated without needing to go that far.  But those examples I called cheaper are also generally lesser known, so some probably don't realize it's possible to make a film like this with a shorter run time.

The thing about my calling them "cheaper" is I'm pretty sure that, adjusted for inflation, modern Hollywood can recreate the spectacle of the biggest ones with the budget of the smaller ones.

My LOTR comparison might be an argument against them working shorter.  But you see sometimes I feel the individual discs of the Extended Editions work as stand alone films, especially FOTR, that could have easily just been two movies.  Some have said they'd have preferred the LOTR been 6 movies equating to the six books Tolkien wrote them as.  That would be more viable today then it was back then as it's almost a Cinematic Universe in reverse, the second movie is the only one with all the Fellowship together.

Basically they work shorter if you try to cover less in one movie.  Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra covers less then the second half of what the Burton and Taylor Cleopatra film covered, and Charlton Heston made a movie for it that was five minutes shorter then The Dark Knight Rises.  Even a The Ten Commandments remake could work split into two films, or a trilogy with the third covering the wandering stuff DeMille's film didn't.  But suppose for the sake of creativity you want to cover subject matter old Hollywood didn't.  A Maccabees film wouldn't need to be too long if you stopped at the first Hanukkah.  There are a lot of potential interesting film ideas that haven't really been tapped yet.

Basically just find a visionary director who really likes and appreciates those old films and I'm confident they can find a way to re-imagine the basic appeal for modern audiences.  Maybe Spielberg or Colin Trevorrow would be interested since there are aspects of their appeal in both Jurassic Park and Jurassic World (I still haven't gotten to see Fallen Kingdom yet) perhaps more so the latter, Spielberg also likes to go the gritty route sometimes so he'd be a risk.  George Lucas could be perfect since his appreciation of these old school films are where Star Wars and Indiana Jones came from, one of the reasons I love The Prequels is because they remind me of these films a lot, I already talked about that in relation to Ben-Hur.