The bottom line is that nobody wants to deal with the liberal outrage which would come from multiple directions. One of the big reasons why the ancient world gets skirted around so heavily is that it plays havoc with political ideologies that rely heavily on avoiding things that happened more than a few centuries ago.
The thing is that Egypt was heavily into keeping slaves, as were the empires that came before them. A big part of their mentality was discrimination against lighter skinned people, with what we would not call Europeans being pretty much the global whipping boys, the rude barbarians that were terrorized, enslaved, and exploited by the darker skinned peoples of the fertile crescent and the later empires of darker skinner mediterreneans . Simply put you saw these civilizations developing while the so called "white devil" was still existing in barbarity and being treated as a natural resource. To show thousands of years worth of oppression here sort of plays havoc with the whole anti-white/black empowerment/slavery guilt trip heaped used for politics nowadays as it shows the inconvenient truth that whites haven't "dominated" the world very long, were not in a position to practice slavery long, and arguably our big influence on slavery and human ownership has been trying to end it.
Basically if you have big dark skinned guys running around beating on white slaves, raping the women/concubines, killing them casually, and all of that other stuff it might be accurate but it's not going to play well to the audiences. What's more if your setting out to portray the culture trying to act like all the main characters were secretly modern anti-slavery liberals sort of defeats the purpose, especially when you consider these attitudes are so ingrained that even now we have problems with human trafficking in the region.
As a result you see deliberate attempts to white wash things to play down the ethnic controversy, and of course when it comes to women as well, you tend to see an effort spent on trying to re-tell the same stories of the exceptions that occurred to get around the attitudes about women as property which indeed still continue to some extent to this day.
Then of course there is the whole issue of those same great works and how they were accomplished. You've seen many theories about how such things could have been accomplished (benefitting from modern hindsight) but none of which account for everything. Entire books have been written about the Pyramids, The Sphinx, and everything else and tried to explain both how they were built and also why the same techniques (or versions of them) were not used elsewhere to achieve similar results in general construction. These range from people trying to reverse engineer things with low tech solutions, to making arguments about Aliens and various Paranormal or Supernatural explanations. The problem is further complicated by competing theories, potentially falsified evidence, and an Egyptian government which generally did not give a crap about any of this until fairly recently and mostly only cares nowadays because of the money involved. Egypt being the hypocrites who spent decades encouraging and leeching off of foreign interest and trying to attract expeditions since whether people carried off gold, mummies, etc... or not they spent tons of cash in the local economy just trying. Egypt having done things like falsifying hieroglyphs (which Europeans did as well), legends, maps, stories, etc... all in order to get universities to spend money. This not only makes Egyptian demands for the return of mummies, treasure, etc.. for "cultural reasons" after the fact when they encouraged this treasure hunting particularly hypocritical, but it also means a lot of the historical facts are ambigious due to all of the stuff the Egyptians created themselves to get the attention of early Egyptologists into their area. This means that even what people are sure of 100% one moment can be proven false later due to all the disinformation. This makes dealing with Egypt in particular difficult other than in the most general sense since the Rock Star Egyptologist of today can be tomorrow's total laughing stock.
The point I'm getting at is that while the trappings of "Hollywood Egypt" are cool, there are reasons why you don't see much done with it. The more detailed you need to get the more problems you run into both in terms of factual depictions, and concerns about political outrage from one perspective or another.
To be fair a lot of this also applies to why you don't see more done with Greece and Rome as well outside works of fantasy or focusing on very specific topics like military battles. It's easier to work with than Egypt, but when you go past some kind of "Sword and Sandals" flick or some cheezed up version of a myth it becomes progressively more difficult. The last big attempts we saw here were "Spartacus" on TV and of course HBO's "Rome".
That said there are rumors Angelina Jolie wants to take her turn at trying to do a "Cleopatra" movie, if that works better for her than other attempts you might see a period of Hollywood Glamour inspired by it again as people knock it off (or try). I imagine the more successful a work is the less they are going to actually care about the history though.
