Maybe you’ve been a fan of Alexander for a while, thanks to what Hans Gruber called “the benefits of a classical education.” Maybe you’ve just run across him for the first time, thanks to Alexander: The Making of a God on Netflix. Either way, you’re probably thinking “I could go for some more of this guy. He seems Great.”
You’re in luck. Thanks to the empire that he conquered and the simple but elegant branding inherent in adding “the Great” to the end of his first name, Alexander the Great has been name dropped, quoted, and portrayed in movies and TV shows across a spectrum of different genres. Here’s a look at a few choice projects featuring the Macedonian powerhouse. None of them is Alexander from 2004. A lot of them are superhero movies and TV shows. A lot of everything is superhero movies and TV shows these days.
Moon Knight
The question was “What is Marvel going to do when they run out of popular A-list characters to make shows and movies about?” The answer: Moon Knight.
Set largely apart from the stories taking place in the rest of the MCU and drawing from a bevy of comic book sources, Moon Knight was a pleasant surprise when it hit Disney Plus back in 2022. One of the many pieces of world-building that the series presented to viewers: The fact that Alexander the Great hadn’t conquered an unprecedented landmass on his own, but had done so with the help of Ammit, the Egyptian goddess backing the play of series antagonist Arthur Harrow. In the episode “The Tomb,” we even get to see Oscar Isaac reach elbow-deep into Alexander the Great’s mouth like a dentist who got into the business for the wrong reasons. It’s a heck of a show.
Watchmen
With the benefit of hindsight, maybe someone should have made it their business to check on Adrian Veidt in the world of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. In everyone’s defense, he doesn’t come off as the most fun guy to hang out with. He’s the kind of guy who describes himself as having only really felt a connection with Alexander the Great as a kid, before realizing that Ramses II was the real cool emperor. You just know that he’d correct you pronunciation all the time and hate your taste in music.
Veidt’s desire to be more like his despotic heroes eventually ends, depending on which version of the story you’re into, with either a giant fake squid in the middle of Manhattan, or a sour blue nuclear detonation at the center of the same. Either way, probably not what Alexander had in mind when he razed Thebes, but you can’t pick your fans.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monsters
For the uninitiated, Yu-Gi-Oh! was a series of elaborate practical jokes played by 4Kids Entertainment on unpopular American children in the late ‘90s and early 2000s. Theoretically the story of a boy playing a card game with borderline-actionable ties to Pokemon, it constantly asked the question “how impenetrable can we make this franchise?”
By way of example: What was generally a story about the perfect marriage between a card game and dog fighting took a detour in 2006 with a mid-season inbetweenquel called Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monsters, in which the characters from the show were transported into a board game via a map in a pyramid. There, they soon discovered an enigmatic masked man – obviously, this turns out to be Alexander the Great, still alive after all these centuries and very into catching and training dragons and battling his evil component self. Yu-Gi-Oh! Capsule Monsters deserves a spot on this list, if not as great cinema, then as the only television series to date with a Wiki entry that features the words “then Alexander (the great) attacks with ‘Multi-Dimensional Laser Assault.’”
Alexander the Great (1963)
In fairness, Alexander the Great from 1963 wasn’t particularly good. It wasn’t even particularly from 1963. It was a failed pilot for a TV series, developed in 1963 and shelved due to being expensive and not awesome.
What makes it worth watching, however, is its cast. Remember when all of those shelved Chris Hemsworth movies suddenly hit theaters right as he was getting Marvel famous? That’s sort of what happened here – Alexander the Great starred a pre-Star Trek William Shatner as the eponymous Alexander, and a pre-Batman Adam West as his nemesis, Cleander. It was released in 1968 as a TV movie, with the network hoping to latch onto some nerdy audience interest. The result: 50 minutes of television that you hadn’t heard of until now, readily available to watch on YouTube thanks to how little anyone still holding the copyright cares about it.