It has toppled Mel Gibson's Almighty epic The Passion of the Christ from the top of the North American box office charts.

BBC: Dawn of the Dead (2003)

And I think Mel Gibson and other celebrities have tried to pull that off, and it doesn't tend to work.

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It is hard to believe that just six years ago Mel Gibson ranked No. 1 on our Forbes Celebrity 100 list.

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ROME, Italy (CNN) -- Pope John Paul II has seen the controversial Mel Gibson movie, "The Passion of Christ, " and he liked it, Vatican sources said Wednesday.

CNN: Sources: Pope likes Gibson's 'Passion of Christ'

It was like stepping onto the set of "Mad Max, " the 1979 Mel Gibson film in which everything seemed in a perpetual state of destruction or chaos.

CNN: Liberia: Sweet land of liberty now bitter, broken

The novel was so savage, in fact, that Mel Gibson's Icon Productions owned the book for almost a decade without figuring out a way to film it.

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