Credit: Saban Films
Sat 29 August 2026 19:45, UK
Has Mel Gibson actually been cancelled, or was he once cancelled and now isn’t cancelled?
Nobody seems to know, or can really answer it with any conviction. Everyone agreed that he probably should have been, given how bad the incidents he was involved with between 2006 and 2010 were, but somehow, he has come out the other side.
For a while afterward, he did experience being dropped from several projects, including not being allowed to do a voice in Chicken Run 2, which isn’t much of a punishment let’s face it, but in the main, his response to, picking an example at random, having screamed at his ex-girlfriend and daughter, threatening to burn their house down with them in it, was simply to not make any films for a bit, and then start making them again.
He has always said ridiculous, offensive stuff, as far back as 1991, in fact, when he had a go at gay people for no reason, and he only really got away with it by virtue of the fact it was ‘a different time’, and he was frankly making a shedload of cash at the box office with hit after hit.
Gibson was undeniably talented as a director, as proved by his making Oscar winners like Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto, but by the end of the 1990s his acting was beginning to wind down a bit having been at it for 20 years since the original Mad Max films, and when he made a sci-fi thriller with M.Night Shyamalan in 2002 it proved to be his last acting role for eight years.
Signs was a big deal; Shyamalan was an industry and audience favourite at the time, thanks to the global success of the fantastically spooky The Sixth Sense, and the director wanted Gibson to lead his third film because he was such a fan of his work in the Lethal Weapon series in the 1980s and ‘90s with Danny Glover.
It didn’t start off well, though. On the set of the film, Shyamalan had to take Gibson aside and let him know he needed to calm it down, that his acting was over the top. Gibson recalled: “I felt ham-fisted. He told me I was just doing too much. I looked around, though, and I was the oldest guy on the set, and I felt like the least sophisticated. I decided I needed to rethink everything.”
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
Gibson was crestfallen after the shoot, explaining: “I felt like a dinosaur… I got into this, all of this, because I wanted to be good. I walked away because I don’t know that I was bringing much new to anything. It could be argued that I’m not bringing anything new to it in this film, but I would argue that I did.”
With an early role for Joaquin Phoenix, who was riding high after the success of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, Signs was a slow-burner, the tale of a farming priest who discovers that the crop circles in his field are the result of extra-terrestrials. The film has become famous for two things: all the glasses of water left around a house and one of the most impressive jump scares in modern cinema history.
It proved to be another enormous hit for Shyamalan, bringing in $408m at the box office and becoming the director’s third success in a row, coming after another Bruce Willis movie with 2000’s comic book smash Unbreakable. When Gibson did eventually return to acting, it was in 2010’s Edge of Darkness, a passable thriller alongside Ray Winstone.
