It's been a challenging year for Lionsgate, but Borderlands stands out as the studio's biggest box office flop. Following a disastrous $9 million opening weekend, the movie ended its month-long run at the box office with a dismal $31 million.
With a production budget of $115 million and a $30 million marketing campaign - which saw fans of the games largely reject everything they were seeing - the studio has likely lost upwards of $114 million.
Lionsgate has now shared its second-quarter financial results, singling out Borderlands as one of its biggest money-losers.
Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer said, "Within our television Group, our unscripted business is feeling the effects of a continuing market correction. In our film group, the poor box office performance of Borderlands, coupled with softer-than-anticipated results for other releases in the quarter, reflected an environment with less margin for error than ever before."
He'd add that, "nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong: it sat on the shelf for too long during the pandemic, and reshoots and rising interest rates took it outside the safety zone of our usual strict financial models. Several of our other releases in the quarter, though cushioned by financial models that worked as intended, didn’t live up to either our standards or our projections."
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, The Crow, Never Let Go, and Megalopolis likely all fall into that category.
According to Lionsgate CFO Jimmy Barge, Borderlands' losses "[were] outside the range of outcomes we would expect, given the underlying IP cast and size of the film’s budget.
"As always, we learned valuable lessons from every release, and Borderlands is no exception. We are confident that our go-forward processes will help reduce the likelihood of a similar outcome in the future," Barge added.
The studio seems far more confident about its future prospects as the likes of Ballerina and Now You See Me 3 are on the way, as is another Hunger Games movie.
Starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Edgar Ramirez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon, and Jamie Lee Curtis, Borderlands is based on the video game Borderlands created by Gearbox Software and published by 2K.
Eli Roth directed the movie from a screenplay he penned with Joe Crombie. However, it's been widely reported that he handed over directing duties to Deadpool helmer Tim Miller for the movie's reshoots.
Needless to say, we don't anticipate Borderlands 2 ever becoming a reality.