Every now and again, a big budget blockbuster comes along that leaves you scratching your head and wondering why it was decided to spend so much money on a movie that’s never going to do anything other than bomb spectacularly. On that front, Gods of Egypt managed to live up to expectations and then some, but it failed on every other conceivable level.
It’s insane to think that at no point during the development and production process did anyone consider funneling $140 million into a lavish fantasy epic nobody was even remotely interested in might be a bad idea, and you’d imagine the only people left shocked when director Alex Proyas’ Egyptian fable ended up losing $90 million were the folks who put it together.
A 15 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and five Razzie nominations including Worst Picture, Worst Director, and Worst Screenplay were all entirely justified and fully deserved, but the knives were out long before then after both Proyas and Lionsgate were forced into issuing public apologies over the whitewashing of virtually the entire principal cast.
At first, the mastermind behind The Crow, Dark City, and I, Robot tried to play down the controversy, only to rapidly back down from his initial stance of calling critics of the lack of diversity “deranged idiots.” Hardly anyone emerged from the cinematic wreckage unscathed with the exception of the late Chadwick Boseman, though, who seemed to know he was appearing in a flaming dumpster fire and wisely opted to pitch his performance as extravagantly over the top as possible.
And yet, despite its terrible reputation, Gods of Egypt has always been threatening to grow increasingly popular as an ironically-embraced camp classic, which might go some way to explaining why FlixPatrol has revealed it to be one of the most popular titles on Starz this week. It can definitely be enjoyed under the right circumstances, just not in the way its creators intended.
Published: Mar 31, 2023 03:19 am