Gerard Butler’s Painful 15% RT Fantasy Epic Was So Bad, It Nearly Ended the Director’s Career

Objectively good movies aren’t always what you need for a night in. Sometimes, you need a flavor of wondrously bad and beautifully outrageous to finish off your week. Funnily enough, mythological adaptations have plenty of these kinds of films, where the legends are so terribly misshapen in the film that you can barely recognize them, and the costumes look like they were borrowed from the local LARP group. Examples like Clash of the Titans or The Mummy are victims for this, yet we keep coming back to them for all their quirks.

2016 gave us another mythological mishap, Gerard Butler‘s Gods of Egypt, which once again proves that we love movies labeled as “bad,” as it surged on the Netflix charts almost a decade later. But this re-imagining of Egyptian myths, which is streaming for free on Pluto TV, was also steeped in dire controversy, from a poor critical reception, a huge loss at the box office, and a ruthless rant by the Australian director, Alex Proyas. Afterward, Proyas would take a huge break from Hollywood, but the film’s delayed popularity begs the question: was it really deserving of all this drama?

‘Gods of Egypt’ Faced Huge Controversy Before It Was Released

There’s one thing that should be an easy win for mythological adaptations, yet it is also the one thing that is commonly overlooked or neglected: appropriate racial casting. Before the film was even released, the trailer and movie posters, which featured a mainly white cast in a supposedly Egyptian legend, sparked immense controversy online. It set a negative tone ahead of the film’s release, and it didn’t help that the CGI, green screens, and overall effects in the trailer were less-than-well-received, especially since Gods of Egypt is a big-budget fantasy saga. But Proyas admitted that their “casting choices should have been more diverse” and apologized for it alongside Lionsgate.

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However, upon release, the situation did not improve for Gods of Egypt, as it flopped at the box office, opening with $14 million domestically and $24.2 million internationally after a budget of $140 million, and was met with dismal critical reception, only garnering 15% on Rotten Tomatoes. Unfortunately, what added fuel to the fire was Proyas’ social media tirade against critics, blaming them for spending their time “trying to work out what most people want to hear” rather than properly evaluating the film on its own merits. His strongly worded post added to the heated debate around the film.

Bear in mind, Gods of Egypt was a memorable blip in Proyas’ directorial career, but it certainly doesn’t define it. Beforehand, he had directed a string of successful and widely applauded films, some of which have turned into cult classics, including 1994’s The Crow, 1998’s Dark City, and 2004’s I, Robot. Although he did take a step away from Hollywood after the fantasy flop, he eventually resurfaced in 2020 with a horror short called Mask of the Evil Apparition and later founded the Heretic Foundation in 2021, a studio that focuses on independent films.

Is ‘Gods of Egypt’ Truly Irredeemable?

Apart from the drama that precipitated around the film, is Gods of Egypt really deserving of it? In her review, Collider’s own Perri Nemiroff identified it as a film that couldn’t even fit into the “so bad, it’s good” category, but its resurgence in 2025 perhaps says otherwise. Maybe the film needed a decade to stew, where all the mythological inaccuracies, from the costumes to the blatant brush over Egyptian culture, can be enjoyed with a laugh now. With Gerard Butler taking on a muscles-on-muscles godly role, transforming into a jackal-like creature, and trying to usurp his brother’s throne (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), it’s a fun romp into a golden, shiny world, as long as you treat it as a fantasy without roots. With swords, sorcery, waxed chests, and bizarre CGI creatures with glowing eyes, it’s an easy movie to chuck on in the background for a chuckle — even if that wasn’t the film’s intention.

Gods of Egypt is definitely marred with controversy and should have had a more thoughtful approach to casting, storytelling, and Egyptian mythology, but it still echoes the ambition of a director who simply missed. While the film does take itself too seriously at times, it seems that the audience certainly isn’t, making it the perfect film to turn your brain off to.