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Australian filmmaker Alex Proyas has apologised for how he cast Gods of Egypt, an action fantasy movie shot in Sydney that has proven controversial for featuring predominantly white actors.
After criticism that followed the release of the poster and trailer this month, the director of Dark City, I, Robot and Knowing issued a statement indicating that he had erred in casting the movie set in ancient mythical Egypt. 
"The process of casting a movie has many complicated variables but it is clear that our casting choices should have been more diverse," Proyas said. "I sincerely apologise to those who are offended by the decisions we made."
The $US140 million movie centres on a young thief, played by former Home and Away star Brenton Thwaites, who enlists the help of the gods to bring his beloved (Australian actress and model Courtney Eaton from Mad Max: Fury Road) back from the dead.
Scotland's Gerard Butler, Australia's Geoffrey Rush and Denmark's Nikolaj Coster-Waldau play the Egyptian gods Set, Ra and Horus respectively.
The cast also includes fellow Australians Abby Lee, Bryan Brown and Emma Booth, England's Rufus Sewell, American Chadwick Boseman and France's Elodie Yung.
The studio releasing the film, Lionsgate, also issued an apology, saying: "We recognise that it is our responsibility to help ensure that casting decisions reflect the diversity and culture of the time periods portrayed. In this instance we failed to live up to our own standards of sensitivity and diversity, for which we sincerely apologise.
"Lionsgate is deeply committed to making films that reflect the diversity of our audiences. We have, can and will continue to do better."
After the collapse of a planned big-budget adaption of John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost three years ago, Proyas moved on to Gods of Egypt. He said that being Egyptian born, he had long wanted to make a movie set in ancient Egypt.
It was shot at Sydney's Fox Studios last year and opens in Australia on   February 25 and the US a day later.
Storms over racial casting - so-called whitewashing - have dogged Cameron Crowe's Aloha, which had Emma Stone as an Asian-American character, and Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings, which had Christian Bale and Joel Edgerton as Moses and Ramses, in the past year.
Scott defended his decision as being about financing. "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," he said. "I'm just not going to get it financed. So the question doesn't even come up."
Gods of Egypt came under fire when the movie's posters were released showing Butler (300) and Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones) as warring Egyptian gods.
An uproar on social media included a geography lesson from Bette Midler.
"Movie, #GodsOfEgypt in which everyone is white?" she tweeted. "Egyptians, in history and today, have NEVER been white. BRING BACK GEOGRAPHY!! It's Africa!"
The uproar increased when the trailer was released, with a Deadline Hollywood writer saying the casting stood out like a leftover from 1950s Hollywood.
"Given the millennia that has passed since the height of ancient Egyptian civilisation, it's difficult to know with any precision just what ancient Egyptians actually looked like," wrote Ross A. Lincoln. "However, based on the statuary and monuments that have survived, not to mention thousands of years of other cultures commenting on them, they definitely weren't white people with flowing, curly blond locks, and their gods were definitely not Europeans."
The director of the Martin Luther King movie Selma, Ava DuVernay, noted the rarity of the apology given how common this kind of casting was in Hollywood.
"This kind of apology never happens - for something that happens all the time," she tweeted. "An unusual occurrence worth noting."
DuVernay followed up with a tweet that said the Gods of Egypt casting made her value director J.J. Abrams' multiracial casting on Star Wars: The Force Awakens more and cheer more for Ryan Coogler's boxing movie Creed.
"We all deserve icons in our own image," she wrote.