Hadn’t heard that one yet. But that’s more of a comedy, right? (I haven’t seen it.)
Re: The Princess Bride
I wouldn’t call it a comedy, as there are few jokes. I consider it a light-hearted adventure, with some wonderful swordplay.
My introduction to British history (other than WWI and II) came from watching epic movies:
***Beckett ***(1964)
The Lion in Winter (1968)
A Man for All Seasons (1966)
Anne of the Thousand Days (1969)
Mary, Queen of Scots (1971)
***Cromwell ***(1970)
All seen a number of years after they came out.
I feel I should add the BBC’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elizabeth R to the list, since they both were outstanding documentary dramas. Glenda Jackson’s portrayal of Elizabeth I in particular was just superb!
Only one “t” in Becket.
I’d speculate that the aftermath of the 60’s and Vietnam left a lot of people unable to get swept up in that kind of film for awhile, then no one was making them so no one else did, then the pendulum swept back.
I think one of the reasons **Star Wars ** punched so far above it’s weight was that it dressed all that epic warrior righteousness in such a new package.
I don’t mean everybody, of course, but a sizable enough chunk to effect the market.
Hey, it was the twelfth century. He could spell it any way he wanted to!
There’s Flesh+Blood, 1985. Otherwise, the 80s was largely fantasies - your Willows, Dragonslayers, Beastmaters, Conans etc. for the epic combat stuff, and your more understated thinkpieces, like Name of the Rose
It’s already been mentioned, but Rob Roy, which also came out in 1995, is a better film than Braveheart in my opinion.
The Princess Bride is very much a comedy, in addition to being a romance and an adventure movie.
I’m surprised that neither of these has been mentioned yet but:
Glory
Dances with Wolves
While DwW pretty quickly leaves the battlefield, it does start with a full battle and some notable scenery chewing.
How 'bout Orson Welles’ stuff? The Shakespeare stuff, ya know?
Watched Rob Roy last night, buy the way. What a cast! But after seeing Brian Cox in Super Troopers, kinda hard to take him seriously. I kept picturing him eating a bar of soap out of frustration or saying, “Shenanigans”.
Will no one rid me of this troublesome plural?
Oh yeah! The one where the Roman good guys win but at the very end of the story, we find out the villain didn’t really die. Another cheap cliffhanger for a sequel that’s still stuck in pre-production hell.
Another “epic” movie (I like to think of it that way) I could watch over and over again is The Man Who Would Be King: Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, and based on a work by Rudyard Kipling. They just don’t get any better than that! 
Given the other movies mentioned, Ben Hur (1959) should probably also be included. It had a huge budget for the time, $15 million, but also a huge box office, $146 million, and won 11 Academy Awards.
You could make a case for Zulu being a historical epic.
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Where are you setting your boundaries - huge (for the limitations of the time) scale? success at the box office?
Here’s one overview of some possible candidates
One not listed there, because it was forgotten or thought lost for years was Abel Gance’s Napoleon.
Gance’s Napoleon, was that ever completely lost or forgotten? Not sure; it’s been receiving critical acclaim as a masterpiece since 1980.
But it’s hardly the kind of thing to convince a studio to pump millions in a new historical blockbuster.
Some call Ghostbusters (any part) a comedy, I totally didn’t get that when I was a kid.
I dunno. Spunkyliver?
It sort of depends on how you phrase it. When Kevin Brownlow first saw bits of it in 1954, Gance’s reputation was at a low ebb, though he’d always been able to continue making films. And, of course, the reputation of silent films in general was pretty low at the time.
Copies of Gance’s Thirties butchered version seem to have been commonly preserved and Langlois at the Cinémathèque in Paris thought he had a definitive 4-hour print, but wasn’t letting anyone see it and then, when he did, it turned out to be a very inferior version.
So the film was never completely lost or forgotten, but it was the case in 1954 that it was known only to specialists, that it had a low reputation amongst them and that anyone who had seen it had either seen it long before or had only seen a dodgy version.