Since the massive success of The King’s Speech at the Academy Awards last year, there has been an almost gargantuan scramble by Hollywood studios to produce and release biopics.

A biopic, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a biographical film. And they’re surprisingly popular, both with viewers and with the Academy. The King’s Speech has sparked off the latest ‘true story’ movie craze about notable historical figures. Here are some of the great looking biopics coming soon.

1) Lincoln

This film is the mother of all biopics, from everything that’s known about it. In development for more than a decade, this film is legendary director Spielberg’s treatment of the Lincoln legacy. Originally slated to star Liam Neeson as Lincoln, the Irish actor dropped the film feeling he was “too old” to play the sixteenth president, and was replaced by Daniel Day-Lewis, the legendary character actor who has won two Academy Awards for his work, as well as many smaller awards.

Sally Field, similarly winner of two Oscars, was cast as Mary Todd Lincoln, the president’s wife whose fits of paranoid hysteria and depression would eventually get her condemned to an insane asylum. Joseph Gordon Levitt plays the couple’s eldest son, Robert Lincoln, a captain in the United States Army during the Civil War on the staff of General Ulysses S. Grand (Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Mad Men star Jared Harris). The film, based off the Pulitzer Prize winning book: Team of Rivals by presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, focuses on the last four months of Lincoln’s life. It opens November 9 in theaters.

2) Hyde Park On Hudson

Director Roger Michell (Titanic Town and Venus) helms this film about America’s thirty-second President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Played by comedian and Oscar laureate Bill Murray (Ghostbusters) Roosevelt is presented as the charming, at times fiendishly witty, paternal character he presented to the world through his weekly radio addresses through the Great Depression.

Centering on the momentous occasion of the visit to the United States by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (subjects of The King’s Speech) in 1939, the film features Laura Linney (HBO’s John Adams) as Margatet “Daisy” Suckley, Roosevelt’s cousin, and purported lover. Olivia Williams features as Eleanor Roosevelt, with Samuel west and Olivia Coleman as the King and Queen. It opens in theaters December 7.

3) Emperor

Peter Webber (Girl with a Pearl Earring, Hannibal Rising) helms this World War Two era epic about the working relationship between U.S. Generals Douglas MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones) and Bonner Fellers (Matthew Fox) in their new positions as joint governors of U.S. occupied Japan after the surrender of the Japanese military in 1945.

The film centers on the debate between the two military men about whether or not Japanese Emperor Hirohito should be tried for war crimes along with his Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo. Scheduled to be released sometime in 2013, this film certainly has all the grit and intensity loved by the Academy in action oriented real stories, so it is possible that the studios may seek to release it in January, at the height of Oscar season.

Which of these are you most looking forward to?