Jason Zengerle notes that Disney is selling Apocalypto as “Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto,” and even has Gibson himself narrating a TV spot. “Does Disney really think Mel Gibson is still a selling point?” he wonders.

Well, if they didn’t, they’d be out of their minds. It’s easy to forget, because he hasn’t appeared in any movies in a few years, but Gibson is one of the most bankable – and consistently bankable – movie stars in recent memory. Meanwhile, he’s directed three movies: the first, The Man Without a Face, wasn’t a big deal, but the other two are among the most successful movies of all time. Braveheart wasn’t a box office smash initially, but it won Best Picture and went on to be huge overseas and on VHS and DVD; there’s a reason it’s playing in what seems to be a constant loop on cable. The Passion of the Christ . . . well, you know how that one turned out. ~Ross Douthat

Ross is right about all of this, but I will add a little bit more.  Consider what Disney had on its hands: a movie so unusual and foreign for its intended audience that, if made by almost anybody else, it would be considered the most eccentric, possibly laughable project on the planet.  It is a movie about the Maya, which might be broadly interesting to those who know something about the Maya, and it is about the collapse of a civilisation, which would interest people who like disaster and action flicks, but it is filmed in Mayan dialect and, unlike The Passion, has no handy, easily-recognised and well-known plotline that allows the audience to skip the subtitles if they want.  If anyone else made it, it would be an automatic art-house release, a Mesoamerican answer to Russian Ark (an outstanding film in its own right, but as slow as Apocalypto promises to be fast-paced).  It is only because Mel Gibson succeeded in making a worldwide blockbuster out of a movie filmed entirely in foreign and largely dead languages that anyone would have been willing to back up a project like Apocalypto.  Plus, the entire cast is made up of actors whom no American audience would recognise, because many of them are appearing in a major film for the first time, so Gibson’s name is the only thing that will make the movie familiar to the audience.  To do anything other than feature Gibson’s involvement prominently in all advertisements would be marketing death.  Without his name tied to the movie title, one might very well think that this was some kind of Mexican horror flick.