Borderlands

director Eli Roth candidly explains how the 2024 video game adaptation went so wrong after its critical and commercial failure. Based on the game franchise by Gearbox Software, the action-adventure film hit theaters last August, following Cate Blanchett’s Lilith, a bounty hunter, as she teams up with a crew of misfits for a dangerous mission to find a missing girl. Despite the Borderlands cast also featuring Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, and Jack Black, the film was lambasted by critics and grossed just $33 million worldwide.

During a recent interview with Matthew Belloni on The Town podcast, Roth reflects on Borderlands’ failure and addresses reports that he wasn’t involved in any of the movie’s reshoots. “I did not, that is correct,” Roth confirms, revealing that he was instead already working on his Thanksgiving, his 2023 horror. This made for a unique theater experience for the director, as he reveals that, though he was credited as director and co-writer, he didn’t know what ended up in the final cut of the movie.

Though scheduling may have been to blame for Tim Miller stepping in to direct the reshoots, Roth says it was COVID that really hurt the making of the film. Check out his full comment below:

“Yeah, I was doing Thanksgiving. And it’s also the kind of thing where like, wow, I’m going to see a movie I directed – what happens?’ That was kind of the experience. I remember being [like], am I at the point in my career where I’m going to sit down to watch my own movie that says I wrote and directed it, and I really genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen?”

“There is a thing where they’re like, ‘You know what? You took the money, you can take it on the chin.’ I believe that once they pay you that’s part of the deal. If there’s creative differences or whatever happens, they’re doing reshoots without you, and they say, ‘This is what we’re doing,’ and you’re the figurehead, you get out there, you put on a smile and people just smack you in the face and you gotta stand there and go, ‘Okay, I have a pool.’ You know what I mean? How do you justify it? You don’t.

“By the way, I would work with Lionsgate again, I just wouldn’t work under those circumstances and I think none of us anticipated how complicated things were gonna be with COVID.

“Not just in terms of what we’re shooting, but then you have to do pick-up sH๏τs or reshoots and you have six people that are all on different sets and every one of those sets is getting shut down because the cities have opened up, and now there’s a COVID outbreak and it was just like… we couldn’t prep in a room together, I couldn’t be with my stunt people, I couldn’t do pre-vis, everyone’s spread all over the place. You can’t prep a movie on that scale over Zoom and I think we all thought we could pull it off and we got our ᴀsses handed to us a bit.”

What This Means For Borderlands

The Movie’s Poor Reception Explained

Made on an estimated budget of $115 million, Borderlands could have been looking at a break-even point of around $230 million, a goal it clearly fell very far short of. Though the video game franchise it’s based on remains popular, the film likely lost tens of millions. The Borderlands ending may leave the door open for a sequel, but one is essentially guaranteed not to happen now.

The film’s drastic underperformance at the box office accompanied poor reviews across the board. On Rotten Tomatoes, Borderlands has only a 10% score from critics, with common complaints being the film’s unfunny banter between the main characters and over-reliance on CGI action sequences that are devoid of tension. In her Borderlands review for ScreenRant, Tatiana Hullender goes against the grain with a decent score of seven out of 10, praising the cast while taking issue with the rapid pacing due to a condensed runtime:

The issue is rather that Borderlands seems to have noticed that audiences are tired of movies being overly long and self-indulgent, and thus it course-corrected in the opposite direction. The movie is a тιԍнт hour and forty minutes, and it gets the job done, but it leaves a lot of potential gold mine material on the cutting room floor.

Filmmaking is a collaborative effort, with numerous departments having to work together to bring any movie to life. COVID, then, certainly could have thrown a wrench in the making of Borderlands, but it’s likely that the script also wasn’t in great shape to begin with. It’s worth noting that other movies made during COVID, like Mission: Impossible – ᴅᴇᴀᴅ Reckoning (2023) or fellow video game adaptation The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023), for example, didn’t suffer the same fates.

Our Take On Eli Roth’s Borderlands Comments

Video Game Movies Continue To Be A Challenge To Get Right

It’s important to remember that nobody ever sets out to make a poorly-received or unsuccessful movie. Borderlands‘ failure critically and commercially sounds like a confluence of a number of different factors, and it’s refreshing to see Roth speaking so candidly about his experience.

Getting video game movies right continues to be a challenge for Hollywood, and Borderlands, unfortunately, marks another disappointment. Though it’s not clear what big-screen video game adaptations are still to come in the years ahead, it’s likely that the Gearbox Software game franchise won’t be getting the Hollywood treatment again anytime soon.

Source: The Town