Gods of Egypt director calls film critics ‘deranged idiots’ after negative reviews and box-office flop

Alex Proyas' latest film grossed just $14m on its debut despite a $140m budget

Gods of Egypt director Alex Proyas has posted a seething rant on Facebook branding film critics “deranged idiots”.

Proyas’ fantasy epic flopped with a $14 million debut despite a budget of $140 million, making him far from flavour of the month with studio Lionsgate.

But the 52-year-old, best known for I, Robot and The Crow, insists that reviewers hate him no matter what he does because they “fail to understand or pretend to not understand what the movie is”.

Proyas drew attention to the backlash Gods of Egypt received when its casting was first announced. Film fans were angry at the decision to put western actors Gerard Butler and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in leading Egyptian roles, as Ridley Scott did in Exodus: Gods and Kings.

“This time of course they have bigger axes to grind - they can rip into my movie while trying to make their mainly pale asses look so politically correct by screaming ‘Whitewash!’ like the deranged idiots they all are,” Proyas wrote. “Seems most critics spend their time trying to work out what most people will want to hear. Lock a critic in a room with a movie no one has even seen and they will not know what to make of it.

“Because contrary to what a critic should probably be they have no personal taste or opinion, because they are basing their views on the status quo. None of them are brave enough to say ‘Well, I like it’ if it goes against consensus. Therefore they are less than worthless.”

Proyas did spare a moment to praise the late, great Roger Ebert, who apparently “wasn’t bad” as a critic with his “contagious” passion for film. Now, the director has decided, we are left with “a pack of diseased vultures pecking at the bones of a dying carcass, trying to peck to the rhythm of the consensus”.

So there you go, aspiring film critics. Alex Proyas already hates you.