Following last year’s disastrous Borderlands movie, which was both a critical and commercial flop, the film’s director, Eli Roth, has come forward to share his thoughts on the debacle, alluding that the circumstances surrounding its development, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent reliance on video conference apps like Zoom, were major factors leading to the film’s eventual failure.
Appearing on the podcast The Town, Roth admitted that he wasn’t sure what the film’s final cut would turn out to be due to the reshoots by Deadpool director Tim Miller, who took over the reins of the project in early 2023 in a move to allow Roth to focus on his other upcoming project at the time, 2023’s horror slasher flick Thanksgiving.
” [It was] the first time [I was] going to see a movie sort of being like, ‘OK, I directed this, what happens?’. That was kind of an experience like, never had that before,” Roth recalled, ” And I remember being… Am I at the point of 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?”
Despite the movie’s unfortunate performance, Roth still holds much respect for everyone that worked on it, adding that he would still be open to working with Lionsgate in the future, but not under the same circumstances caused by the then-rampant COVID-19 pandemic.
“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 shots 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… 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.” He added, “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 asses handed to us a bit.”
The Borderlands movie, a live-action adaptation of 2K Games and Gearbox Software’s popular first-person looter-shooter video game series, failed to resonate with critics or viewers upon its release, drawing a global box office of only around US$31 million after its theatrical run, missing the mark financially considering its US$115 million production budget and further US$30 million in promotion and distribution costs, with the film quickly shifting to streaming platforms to salvage what it could.
As a silver lining of sorts, the movie did manage to bump up the sales of the games, as reported by Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick during the company’s quarterly earnings call in late 2024. Despite the lackluster movie adaptation, the Borderlands games franchise still has a bright future ahead of it, with the highly anticipated next chapter in the series, Borderlands 4, due for release on 23 September 2025 for the PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC.
Kevin is a reformed PC Master Race gamer with a penchant for franchise “duds” like Darksiders III and Dead Space 3. He has made it his life-long mission to play every single major game release – lest his wallet dies trying.
Joey Leong
