Quote Originally Posted by stuh42asl View Post
On the movie side. One of my favorite movies is Master and Commander, followed by the Horatio Hornblower series.With all the CGI wiz kids out there , why has no one ever made a serious full length movie of the battle? Would be awesome to see 1st rates going at each other. If they could make a movie about Waterloo, why not Trafalgar??
Time scale -- first shots were fired at 11:15AM or so; _Victory_ didn't fire its first salvo until around noon; Nelson gets shot about 1:15PM, and doesn't die until around 4:15PM. There's going to be a *lot* of footage of Ships Moving Very Slowly (the battle was quite literally fought in The Calm Before The Storm...).

Then there's all the stuff *around* the battle -- the fact that Villeneuve actually managed to sail to the West Indies and back before getting bottled up in Cadiz; the unending arguments between the French and Spanish (realize: Trafalgar would never have happened if one of the French admirals had not questioned the courage of the Spanish...); the storm that night which cost the British most of their prizes; the marginally-successful rescue attempt by the remainder of the Combined Fleet a day or so afterward. Any way it gets edited, this is going to be *at least* three hours of movie, which is going to limit the amount of times per day it can be shown, which subsequently limits its profitability; add to that it's not exactly a full-on Action Movie, but a niche-market Historical Film, and the chances of profitability are as near zero as makes no odds.