Ben Hur. 1959. Eleven Oscars. And yeah — it earned every single one of them.

This week on Movie Wars, Kyle, Seth, and John Datoy sit down to dig into what might be the greatest epic ever put on film. We're talking about a movie so massive, so meticulously crafted, that it basically wrote the rulebook for every sword-and-sandals film that came after it. No Ben Hur? No Gladiator. No Kingdom of Heaven. No Lord of the Rings. Honestly, no pod racing either. This thing casts a shadow over cinema that most films can only dream about.

Seth — who watched the actual movie plus three full-length documentaries about it — breaks down the wild history of this story, from a Civil War general writing biblical fiction in the 1880s to the chaotic 1925 adaptation where they literally set ships on fire in the Mediterranean Sea and realized too  ...