The past few years of Mel Gibson's life have been marred by controversy thanks to antisemitic, misogynistic, and racist comments and the backlash has hit him right where it hurts: the box office. While he's only acted in two movies since he directed Passion of the Christ - The Edge of Darkness and The Beaver - both films severely under-performed in theaters, the former making only $43 million domestically on a $80 million budget and the latter pulling in less than a million. Even his last directorial effort, Apocalypto, failed to have much success. So how do you reverse the damage caused by hurling comments about race? Have the title of your next film hurl them at you!
MovieHole has learned that the title of Gibson's next film, How I Spent My Summer Vacation, has been changed to Get the Gringo. While the word is typically used to simply mean "foreigner," it is often interpreted as a disparaging remark. While the site confirmed the title change with a local distributor, they are based in Australia, meaning that the domestic title could go unchanged. The title has also been swapped on IMDb, but that's hardly an official source. In the film Gibson will play a criminal who is thrown into a Mexican prison and learns to survive thanks to the help of a 9-year-old boy. The film co-stars Peter Stormare and Breaking Bad's Dean Norris and is directed by Adrian Grunberg.
It's also worth noting that the film doesn't yet have a US distributor or release date, so regardless of what the movie is called, we may not ever even get to see it theatrically. Good? Bad? You decide.
