Joel Edgerton is probably one of his generation’s most underrated actors. Case in point: He has two vastly different movies doing extremely well on streaming right now. The first is the acclaimed Western drama Train Dreams, among the year’s top-rated movies and a sure-shot awards contender. The second is a $200 million box office bomb in which he played the Pharaoh Rameses II. The movie in question, Ridley Scott‘s Exodus: Gods and Kings, was released over a decade ago to poor reviews and an underwhelming box office response. Scott made things worse by making unsavory comments around the casting of white actors in the Middle Eastern lead roles. But the movie always seems to be doing well on home video, and it recently witnessed a spike on the Starz streaming service.
It told the biblical tale of Exodus on the largest canvas imaginable. However, unlike The Ten Commandments or even The Prince of Egypt, the movie didn’t exactly enthrall audiences. It managed to gross only around $260 million globally. Even Darren Aronofsky‘s controversial Noah, which was released in the same year and starred Russell Crowe, made around $360 million worldwide. To make matters worse, Exodus earned poor reviews. The movie is currently sitting at a 29% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics’ consensus reads, “While sporadically stirring, and suitably epic in its ambitions, Exodus: Gods and Kings can’t quite live up to its classic source material.”
Defending the casting of Christian Bale as Moses and Edgerton as Rameses II, Scott said in a 2014 interview, “I can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such. I’m just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn’t even come up.” The iconic filmmaker followed the film’s failure with his biggest hit, The Martian, which debuted only a year later. He needs another hit though, after a string of historical misfires such as The Last Duel, Napoleon, and Gladiator II. Scott’s next movie is the sci-fi title The Dog Stars.
You can watch Exodus at home, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
- Release Date
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December 12, 2014
- Runtime
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150minutes
