'300: Rise of an Empire' trailer released: Gerard Butler's Leonidas makes depressing cameo — as corpse

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'300: Rise of an Empire' trailer released: Gerard Butler's Leonidas makes depressing cameo — as corpse
Director Noam Murro takes over for Zack Snyder in epic that features return of evil Xerxes


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King Leonidas' corpse makes an appearance in the new trailer for '300: Rise of an Empire'

It’s a Greek travesty!
The new trailer for “300: Rise of an Empire,” which hit the Internet Wednesday, opens with the jarring sight of the nefarious Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) riding over the corpses of Gerard Butler’s Spartan King Leonidas and most of his 299 loyal, doomed subjects.

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Lena Headey shoots the breeze as Queen Gorgo.
From there....things get a little more epic.
“The idea of this movie was always that it takes place at about the same time of the first one," director Noam Murro told MTV News. "It's as if you zoomed out and saw a bigger time frame and told a bigger story of what happened in '300.' The first movie speaks to the detail of this sequel.

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Sullivan Stapleton takes over on lead abs for Gerard Butler in the sequel to 2006's '300.'
“It is larger in scale, and it takes place on water,” adds Murro, who took over helming duties from producer Zack Snyder.
Leonidas’ fight is picked up by Greek general Themistocles (Sullivan Stapleton), who has a Persian naval armada to destroy led by Eva Green’s bow-wielding Artemisia.

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Rodrigo Santoro reprises his role as the evil Xerxes.
Returning from the original is Spartan Queen Gorgo, played by “Game of Thrones” star Lena Headey, who vows that her husband’s sacrifice won’t be in vain.
“It begins as a whisper, a promise,” she tells her men. “The lightest of breezes dances above the death cries of 300 men. That breeze became a wind.”

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Eva Green's Artemisia shows her softer side.
A wind of hyper-stylized carnage and sultry sex scenes, apparently, judging by the rest of two-minute, 30-second trailer.
The battle of Thermopylae never looked this cool in a history book.

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The movie is set during the real-life Battle of Thermopylae — though a different verison than the one familiar from the history books.
“300: Rise of an Empire,” loosely based on the graphic novel “Xerxes” by Frank Miller, invades theaters on March 7, 2014.

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Much of the action is set at sea - or at least a CGI version of sea - in '300: Rise of an Empire.'