'300: Battle of Artemisia' Adds Minor Roles For Gerard Butler and Lena Headey

It’s been a while since we’ve heard anything solid about the follow up to Zack Snyder’s 300. But news from Movies.com gives us just an update (as well as some story line familiarity) beyond heresay and rumors a plenty. Producer Bernie Goldmann has confirmed that, “It’s a different story. [However] there’s a small part for Lena Headey. There’s a small part for Gerry [Butler].”

Bringing back King Leonidas and Queen Gorgo in any capacity for this prequel will help tie the two film together even though they more than likely will be regulated to a cameo. Some argue the casting lesser-knowns in the first film helped its success. In that respect you could go as far to say that a new bunch of equal caliber actors might benefit the prequel similarly since it probably wont be filled with “stars” who, in Goldman’s opinion, can take you out of the story, “When you make a period movie like that, it’s great not to know the actors. For me, as an audience, it always brings me into the movie more. You can’t see Tom Cruise in a historical movie. You go, ‘That’s Tom Cruise!’”

So what can we expect of this prequel film titled 300: Battle of Artemisia (wasn’t it going to be called Xerxes at one point?)? And, more importantly, what’s it going to look like? Well Goldmann is very fond of how the first film played out and would to go for a similar approach, “The cool thing about 300 was that our point-of-view going into that movie was we don’t have to be historically accurate and we created an incredible amount of freedom in telling a war story. It became a movie about telling the story to the truth before you go fight a battle and when you tell that story, you’re going to exaggerate because you want to get men fired up to go kill. So you could make the movie operatic.”

Right now Battle of Artemesia is vaguely slated for sometime 2013 and will be directed by Noam Murro (of very little surprisingly). Not to say an unknown director who’ll be directing other possible unknown actors spells certain doom for this but I still say right now this sounds 50/50. Fan boy favoritism aside, I still take comfort in Zack Snyder producing and helping writing this (his writing credits on Sucker Punch not withstanding). What do you think? Does a 300 prequel sound interesting at all? Anyone thing this is unnecessary??