‘Gods of Egypt’ Releases Posters – Twitter Has a Field Day

gods poster 1The recently announced film, Gods of Egypt, has continued Hollywood’s infatuation with whitewashing Egypt or Kemet. The Alex Proyas film, which is set for an early 2016 release, stars Gerard Butler as Set, Brenton Thwaites as Bek, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Horus, and Geoffrey Rush as Ra. The only Black actor, Chadwick Boseman, plays Thoth.

Hollywood has historically whitewashed Egyptian set films since the early days of cinema. Films like The Ten Commandments (1956), Cleopatra (1963), and more recently the 2014 Ridley Scott film, Exodus: Gods and Kings, turned characters that were historically African and Middle Eastern into people with western European features.

Exodus: Gods and Kings was a financial flop, a critical failure with a rotten tomatoes score of 27 percent, and the film was banned in Egypt for its “historical inaccuracies.” Christian Bale played Moses, Joel Edgerton played Ramses and Sigourney Weaver played Ramses’s mother, Tuya because director Scott believed he could not sell a film with a “Muhammad So-and- So” as the star.

The film suffered from a Twitter backlash that chastised the whitewashed cast and the casting of Black people as slaves, thieves, and background characters. It appears Hollywood has not learned from its mistakes. Twitter has let it be known that this should not be happening in 2015.

https://twitter.com/MatthewACherry/status/664915589341679616

https://twitter.com/lunarnomad/status/665092870169341952

https://twitter.com/ztsamudzi/status/664877457925804032

https://twitter.com/Payitforward87/status/664918780229918720

https://twitter.com/ThatJacksonGal_/status/664916513011339264

https://twitter.com/MatthewACherry/status/664909985990623232

https://twitter.com/lepetiterobot/status/664905226076479488

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