Warner Bros. released the first trailer for "300: Rise of an Empire," nine months before the film is scheduled for release. Director of the first "300," Zack Snyder, passed on the sequel to Noam Murro, who calls this installment "larger in scale."

"I think '300' was wonderfully done in an operatic way, one location almost, and explore that," Murro said. "This is a much larger palette, historically and geographically. It is larger in scale, and it takes place on water," Murro told MTV News.

According to The Huffington Post, "Rise of an Empire" was originally going to hit theaters this August, but Warner Bros. moved the film to March 2014, perhaps in an effort to hopefully gain the same success as the first "300," which opened with $70 million on March 9, 2007.

"Rise of an Empire" is based on Frank Miller's graphic novel "Xerxes," The Christian Science Monitor reports. The film centers around the Battle of Artemisium, a naval conflict between the Greeks and Persians. The movie stars Eva Green, Lena Headey, and Rodrigo Santoro - but notably without the star of the original "300," Gerard Butler (though he appears as a corpse briefly in the beginning of the trailer).

The newest installment holds true to the cinematography of its predecessor, with slow-motion action-packed battle scenes, a sandy tint to each shot, and dramatic music and acting.

"I think that was the great thing about working with Zack and working with the studio. The idea was always to create a point of reference of the old movie, but technologically and visually push it further up the hill," Murro said. "It really is quite a difference in the way that it feels and looks. It does happen in water, and geographically, it is open. I think we've pushed it from a visual spectacle uphill, but the roots of this tree are grounded in the '300' world. We wanted to create different styles of battles, and there are very distinct ones in this movie. There's the fire battle and the fog battle."

"300: Rise of an Empire" will hit theaters March 2, 2014.

Watch the trailer here: