Costuming functions as a tool to nonverbally communicate and manipulate visual identities, especially gender identity; applied to the costuming of characters in movies, the visual identity of a character is broadly amplified to the movie-going audience. The purpose of this study was to examine the costuming of male protagonists in historic epic movies for historical accuracy and how the era in which the movie was produced may have affected the level of accuracy. The Ten Commandments (1956) and Spartacus (1960) from the Cold War era and Gladiator (2000) and Troy (2004) from the turn of the millennia were viewed and comparatively analyzed in light of the American social dynamics of each era