The movie Mel Gibson hated simply for existing: “And it’s a piece of shit”
Such is the way he’s fallen from grace in the last two decades, you can’t help but see the irony in Mel Gibson being offended by the mere fact that a motion picture was allowed to exist.
After all, there’s no shortage of people both inside and outside of the industry who remain offended that he’s allowed to exist in a cinematic sense, with his highly-publicised incidents doing nothing to exile him from Hollywood, even if he has been reduced almost entirely to the straight-to-video circuit.
If Gibson was going to be cancelled, blacklisted, or ostracised from the filmmaking community, it would have happened a long time ago, but that became more unlikely than ever to happen when Home Alone 2 and The Little Rascals star Donald Trump named him as a middleman between the White House and Tinseltown.
Sure, it’s a largely ceremonial title and nobody, including Gibson, seems to know what the fuck it means or how he’s supposed to utilise his paper-thin credentials, but he’s got an ally in the highest office in the land, which means that those awful, awful genre flicks he’s been churning out multiple times a year will keep coming.
The two-time Academy Award winner has starred in some expensive films, as you’d expect from someone who was an A-lister from the 1980s to the turn of the millennium at least, but as budgets continue to spiral beyond reasonable levels, as a filmmaker, he was shocked and dismayed by the ballooning costs of movies that aren’t even moderately entertaining.
“I mean, if you’re spending outrageous amounts of money, $180 million or more, I don’t know how you make it back after the taxman gets you, and after you give half to the exhibitors,” he told Deadline. “What did they spend on Batman v Superman that they’re admitting to?”
When he discovered that the estimated expense for Zack Snyder’s turgid, overlong, and nauseatingly boring recreation of a kid smashing their action figures together was $250 million before marketing, he was incredulous, especially the cost-to-quality ratio: “And it’s a piece of shit,” he helpfully added.
“I’m not interested in that stuff,” he went on. “Do you know what the difference between real superheroes and comic book superheroes is? Real superheroes didn’t wear spandex. So I don’t know. Spandex must cost a lot.” It probably doesn’t, to be honest, but if you have to hand it to Gibson for anything these days, it’s his dedication to not doing superhero stuff.
He turned down the chance to play Batman on three occasions, according to him, knocked back Anthony Hopkins’ cycloptic supporting role in Kenneth Branagh’s Thor, and dropped out of negotiations to helm the sequel that eventually became James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, so at least he’s consistent. He’s also correct, because Batman v Superman is a piece of shit.
