Alexander joins the great blockbuster club ALEXANDER the Great conquered the Persian empire, and last summer he conquered Sydney. The Australian Museum has crunched the numbers on its exhibition Alexander the Great: 2000 Years of Treasures from St Petersburg and they reveal it is the most visited cultural exhibition the museum has staged, attracting 161,145 visitors across 22 weeks. That figure eclipses exhibitions staged last summer by the Art Gallery of NSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art, and heralds the arrival of a new player in the blockbuster arena. The AGNSW met its own modest expectations when 106,000 visitors saw Francis Bacon: Five Decades across 13 weeks and 90,000 people visited the MCA's Anish Kapoor survey across 14 weeks. Australian Museum assistant director Steven Alderton says Alexander was the first of several ambitious exhibitions the institution has planned. Next summer the museum will stage a Tyrannosaurus exhibition, featuring a collection of dinosaur skeletons from China. The following year an Aztec exhibition is planned with artefacts from Mexico that will be displayed first at Te Papa museum in Wellington, New Zealand, then the Australian Museum and the Melbourne Museum. We're really interested in engaging with our audiences on a more sophisticated level. Blockbusters are part of that and we're also enhancing our permanent galleries as well," Alderton says. Alexander featured more than 400 items from St Petersburg's State Hermitage Museum displayed to reveal the complexity of the Macedonian king. It was expensive to stage but Alderton would not reveal the costings. It's done what we expected. We're waiting for the final (financial) figures but our projections show it has broken even," he says. The Australian Museum classifies its exhibitions as cultural or natural history and tends to alternate big shows between the two genres. Before Alexander, the record attendance for a cultural exhibition was Rediscovering Pompeii, in 1995, which was seen by 155,000 visitors. The most visited paid natural history exhibition was Dinosaurs Alive, staged in 1990 and seen by 250,769 visitors. The Australian Museum was the country's first museum, built when it was founded in 1829. Despite its moniker implying federal funding, it is funded by the NSW government.