2024 was a challenging 12 months for Lionsgate, but Borderlands stood 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 $33 million worldwide.
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 lost a lot of money.
Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer previously said, "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."
Now, Borderlands director Eli Roth has reflected on the project and argued that COVID-19 was the main issue as were the reshoots he was unable to helm after moving on to Thanksgiving (Deadpool director Tim Miller reportedly stepped in to take charge of those),
"[I] was doing Thanksgiving, and it's also the kind of thing we're like, 'Wow, this is the first time I'm going to see a movie sort of being like, OK, I directed this, what happens?'" he said. "That was kind of an experience like, never had that before."
"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?" Roth added.
"I think none of us, 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, and now there's a COVID outbreak."
"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," Roth continued, "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."
These are all valid reasons, and it must have been challenging for Roth to hand the movie over to Miller and not know what was waiting for him in post-production. However, despite these issues, there were fundamental issues with the script that largely missed the point of the games it was adapting.
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.
Over on Rotten Tomatoes, Borderlands is one of the worst-reviewed video game movies ever, with a terrible 10% score. According to the Critics Consensus, "Glitching out in every department, Borderlands is balderdash." Fans, on the other hand, awarded it a slightly better but still-Rotten 49%.
The Borderlands 4 video game will be released on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S, on September 23.