Director Alex Proyas has hit out at film critics after his latest film Gods of Egypt met with negative reviews.

The Australian film-maker, who was also behind I, Robot and The Crow, released a long Facebook post, calling critics “deranged idiots” and “diseased vultures”. It followed his latest film receiving a string of bad reviews and failing to perform at the box office.

“Seems most critics spend their time trying to work out what most people will want to hear,” he wrote. “How do you do that? Why these days it is so easy … just surf the net to read other reviews or what bloggers are saying – no matter how misguided an opinion of a movie might be before it actually comes out.”

Gods of Egypt had sparked controversy after posters revealed a largely white cast, despite a plot inspired by classic mythology. It stars Gerard Butler and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as warring Egyptian gods and Geoffrey Rush as the Egyptian sun god. Feedback was so poor that studio Lionsgate and Proyas apologised for the film’s lack of diversity.

But the film’s bad reviews (it currently holds a 12% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and weak box office (it made $14m in its opening US weekend, from an $140m budget) has led to many calling it the year’s first disaster.

“We have a pack of diseased vultures pecking at the bones of a dying carcass,” Proyas went on to write. “Trying to peck to the rhythm of the consensus. I applaud any film-goer who values their own opinion enough to not base it on what the pack-mentality says is good or bad.”