Trivia / Gods of Egypt

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $140 million (not counting marketing costs), approx. $170 million (counting them). Box office, $30.7 million (domestic so far), $150.7 million (worldwide), total loss: Almost 100 million. Easily the biggest bomb of the careers of both Gerard Butler and Chadwick Boseman. The film also opened during Deadpool's run, and then had to compete against Disney's Zootopia.
• California Doubling: Filming happened in Australia, because it was deemed too dangerous to use the actual Sahara desert.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: In the Japanese dub, Bek is voiced by Yuuta Tamamori, from the band Kis-My-Ft2 and Zaya by fashion model Mei Nagano, who played Sanjō Tsubame in the Rurouni Kenshin live-action films.
• Creator Backlash: Chadwick Boseman admitted that he had issues with the lack of diversity when he first read the script and took the role partly so there would be at least one actor of African descent in the film.
• Creator Killer: Alex Proyas hasn't directed a feature film since the failure of this, only directing two shorts and then attempting to develop a YouTube alternative called Vidi Verse.
• Dear Negative Reader:
  • After the film's disastrous opening weekend, Alex Proyas went on an massive rant on Facebook lashing out against "politically correct" film critics who gave the movie negative reviews and calling them "deranged idiots".
  • Nikolaj Coster-Waldau responded to the backlash over the casting by saying...
  "I'm not even playing an Egyptian; I'm an 8-foot-tall god who turns into a falcon. A part of me just wants to freak out, but then I think, 'There's nothing you can do about it.' You can't win in that sort of discussion."
• Dueling Works: With another Gerard Butler film, London Has Fallen. While neither film was well-liked by critics, London was a financial success (approximately $206 million worldwide against a $60 million budget), and even with critics still did somewhat better than Gods.
• Dyeing for Your Art:
  • Gerard Butler started an intense workout program as soon as he saw that his character was a god, wanting to look the part by the time filming began.
  • Nikolaj Coster-Waldau likewise went down to only 7% body fat for his role.
• Fake Nationality: None of the actors in the movie are actually Egyptian. Butler, who plays Set, is Scottish. Coster-Waldau, who plays Horus, is Danish. The Australian Geoffrey Rush plays Ra. The French-Cambodian Élodie Yung plays Hathor. Chadwick Boseman, who plays Thoth, is American. Australian (of English, Maori and Chinese heritage) Courtney Eaton plays Zaya.
• Stillborn Franchise: The box office failure coupled with poor reviews killed any chance of this movie becoming Lionsgate's next Hunger Games-style franchise.

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