Gods of Egypt opens with a coronation and ends with a ledger. In between, director Alex Proyas stages a 127-minute action fantasy about Egyptian deities, a mortal thief, and a war for the throne of Egypt. The film was written by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless and released in the United States, Canada, and 70 other markets on February 26, 2016.
It is a failure, and an interesting one to take apart.
Trailer, via Lionsgate Movies.
Horus Loses His Eyes
The plot is a revenge quest with a resurrection clause. In ancient Egypt, where gods live among mortals, thief Bek and his lover Zaya attend the coronation of Horus, son of King Osiris and Isis. Osiris is killed by his jealous brother Set, who then defeats Horus and takes his eyes.
Set proclaims himself king and commands humans to pay riches to pass into the afterlife. One year later, Egypt is enslaved by Set. Isis has committed suicide.
Zaya steals plans for Set’s pyramid from chief architect Urshu. Bek uses them to infiltrate Set’s treasure vault and steals one of Horus’s eyes. Urshu catches them; Zaya is killed as she and Bek try to escape. Bek takes her body to the exiled Horus along with the eye and promises to help find the other if Horus brings Zaya back from the dead.
That is the engine. It runs on a bargain between a thief and a blinded god, and it never generates enough heat to move the thing it is attached to.
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and Gerard Butler
The cast is large and mostly wasted. Nikolaj Coster-Waldau plays Horus. Brenton Thwaites plays Bek. Gerard Butler plays Set. Chadwick Boseman plays Thoth. Élodie Yung plays Hathor. Geoffrey Rush plays Ra. Courtney Eaton plays Zaya.
The supporting roster is deeper than the film deserves:
- Abbey Lee as Anat and Yaya Deng as Astarte, war goddesses loyal to Set who ride giant fire-breathing cobras
- Goran D. Kleut as Anubis, the jackal-headed god who leads Zaya into the underworld
- Alexander England as Mnevis, leader of the Egyptian Minotaurs who work for Set and can assume human form
- Kenneth Ransom as the riddle-giving Sphinx that guards the entrance to Set’s pyramid
- Lindsay Farris as the voice of an older Bek who narrates the film
Coster-Waldau was cast in June 2013. Butler, Rush, and Thwaites joined toward the end of 2013. Boseman and Yung joined at the start of 2014. The film sat long enough for its pieces to settle, and it shows.
A Quest Through Egypt, and a Vial of Water
Bek and Horus visit the solar barque of Horus’s grandfather Ra. Ra is neutral about matters in Egypt and in conflict with the shadow beast Apophis, which threatens to eat the world. He does not restore Horus’s power, but he allows him to take a vial of divine waters to weaken Set.
Ra explains that Horus’s loss of power comes from not fulfilling his destiny. Horus believes that destiny means avenging his parents’ deaths. That is the film’s one clean idea: a god who has misunderstood his own purpose. Gods of Egypt does almost nothing with it.
Back in Egypt, Bek and Horus escape from Mnevis, who is then killed by Set for failing to stop them. Set orders Hathor to take him to the underworld. She refuses and joins Bek and Horus after rescuing them from Astarte and Anat.
The group plans to infiltrate Set’s pyramid. They recruit Thoth to solve the riddle of the guardian sphinx. They pass the entryway and the riddle and reach the source of Set’s power. Before they can use the divine water, they are ambushed.
The Numbers Behind Gods of Egypt
The budget was $140 million. Filming took place in Australia under Summit Entertainment, in collaboration with Thunder Road Pictures and Proyas’s production company Mystery Clock Cinema. The Australian government provided a tax credit for 46% of the film’s budget. Because of tax incentives and pre-sales, Lionsgate’s financial exposure was less than $10 million.
| Figure | Amount |
|---|---|
| Production budget | $140 million |
| Australian tax credit | 46% of budget |
| Lionsgate’s financial exposure | Less than $10 million |
| Worldwide gross | $150.7 million |
| Reported loss for Lionsgate | $90 million |
The film grossed $150.7 million against that $140 million budget. It became a box office failure and lost $90 million for Lionsgate. It received five nominations at the 37th Golden Raspberry Awards.
Read the table again. A film that grosses more than its budget can still lose $90 million, because the budget is not the bill. Marketing, distribution, and the split with exhibitors all take their cut. Gods of Egypt is a clean illustration of a rule the industry understands and the public mostly does not.
The Casting Backlash
When Lionsgate began promoting the film in November 2015, it immediately received backlash for its predominantly white cast playing Egyptian deities. Lionsgate and Proyas apologized for their ethnically-inaccurate casting.
That apology is the most memorable thing the film produced. It arrived before the movie did, which tells you what the marketing was actually selling. A fantasy epic about Egyptian gods, set in Egypt, with a cast drawn almost entirely from Europe, Australia, and white American Hollywood, and the studio knew the problem well enough to address it in advance.
The apology did not fix the film. It did not need to. The film had other problems.
What Gods of Egypt Gets Wrong
The tagline is “The battle for eternity begins.” The film runs 127 minutes and never makes eternity feel like anything worth fighting over.
Proyas has made large-scale genre work before, and Gods of Egypt has the shape of it: a mythic frame, a quest structure, a villain with a motive. What it lacks is texture. Egypt here is a series of soundstages, and the gods are a series of costumes. Set’s takeover should feel like a catastrophe. It plays like a scheduling change.
The dialogue carries exposition in flat blocks. Ra explains destiny. Thoth solves a riddle. Hathor switches sides. Each beat arrives because the screenplay needs it, not because a character earned it.
Boseman’s Thoth is the one performance with any pulse, and the film does not know what to do with him. He solves the sphinx riddle and then the plot moves on. Butler plays Set at full volume, which is the correct choice for a film this thin.
The Verdict on Gods of Egypt
Gods of Egypt scores 2.5 of 10. That matches its critical reception: a Metacritic score of 25 out of 100.
The score is fair. This is not a film with a hidden second life or a misunderstood middle act. It is a $140 million production that spent its money on scale and none of it on the thing that makes scale matter, which is a reason to care who wins.
The casting controversy is the part that will be remembered, and it should be, but it is not the whole story. The film would have failed with a perfect cast. The script gives Horus a destiny he misunderstands and then resolves it with a fight. The gods are immortal, and nothing they do has weight.
What is worth noting is the financial structure. A 46% tax credit and pre-sales kept Lionsgate’s exposure under $10 million on a $140 million film. That is a machine for making expensive movies that do not have to be good. Gods of Egypt is what comes out of that machine.
The film is 127 minutes of action, adventure, and fantasy with a cast that deserved better and a script that did not. It is streaming somewhere. It can stay there.
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