Gods of Egypt

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It’s a step-by-step process of decisions that Hollywood makes that may seem reasonable when examined individually, but when you add them all together are completely insane and result in movies like Gods of Egypt. It happens a lot.

Say a Hollywood exec wants to make a huge summer movie, and doesn’t have the rights to superheroes or any name brands. He decides to look at past summer movies that have made money—not if they’re good, just if they’re profitable—on the assumption that if he makes a similar movie, it will also be profitable. This is reasonable.

This particular exec chances upon the 2010 Clash of the Titans, which made nearly $500 million worldwide. The exec wants to make money! Whether people liked Clash of the Titans is completely irrelevant to him. Making films that people like is not his job; making money is. So he decides to make a movie like Clash of the Titans. This is, superficially, also reasonable.

The exec gives a cursory examination as to what is Clash of the Titans is about, and discovers it’s Greek mythology. So he needs to have something pretty much the same, but still a little different—and the obvious solution is to pick another mythology to base his blockbuster around. He’s likely only even tangentially heard of Norse and Egyptian mythology, and since Marvel’s kind of cornered the market on the former with Thor, he chooses Egypt. Besides, Egyptian mythology has lots of weird stuff that will probably look cool in CG. If you were somehow forced to make a mythology-based summer blockbuster, then Egyptian mythology is a probably a solid call, right?

Now, when it comes to casting, he looks for actors with good summer movie track records who are affordable; both Gerard Butler and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau fit the bill. He hires them. The fact that the movie is set in ancient Egypt doesn’t even enter his mind as a factor. For him, they are two completely separate issues. He is incapable of thinking conditionally, or that the movie’s setting should ever possibly dictate casting. To him, it’s a summer movie first and foremost; it needs popular, recognizable actors. In his mind, he’s got a hit movie with major stars. That’s all that could possibly matter!

At no point does he, or anyone else in authority of making the film, look at the bigger picture and wonder, hey, maybe hiring white guys to play ancient Egyptians is a bad idea. Nor did anyone wonder if anyone actually wanted to see an Egyptian version of Clash of the Titans in the first place. At no point did anyone stop and really think about what they were making, and suddenly realize “This is a terrible idea.” At no point did they see Coster-Waldau, wearing whatever the hell he’s wearing in the picture up top, and ask themselves, “What on god’s green earth are we doing?!”

Instead they just blithely made the movie, confident that not only that it would be a huge success but it would start an entire franchise. Yes, Hollywood thought Gods of Egypt was going to be a trilogy! This is madness, and Hollywood does this all the time. They spend tons of money on movies that sound awful and are awful, and that you’d have to be completely out of touch with reality to believe would ever work.

Every once in a while, though, they manage to get it right, and that successful movie makes enough money to pay for the next dozen terrible movies they think will be hits but won’t be. And the cycle continues.

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