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Borderlands director Eli Roth thinks he knows why the video game adaptation was a flop – and he says COVID-19 is to blame.
Released in August 2024 after several delays, the movie made just over $30 million at the global box office on an estimated budget of $115 million and has a critics' score of just 10% on Rotten Tomatoes.
"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," Roth told The Town podcast (via Dark Horizons).
"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 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 asses handed to us a bit."
Based on the video game series of the same name, Borderlands stars Cate Blanchett as Lilith, an outlaw who's charged with finding the daughter of the most powerful man in the universe, and teams up with a group of misfits to help her do so. The cast also includes Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ariana Greenblatt, Edgar Ramírez, and Gina Gershon.
Almost two years after filming wrapped, the movie went through two weeks of reshoots, which were directed by Deadpool helmer Tim Miller as Roth was directing his slasher movie Thanksgiving at the time.
"This is the first time I’m going to see a movie sort of being like, 'Okay, I directed this, what happens?'" the director said. "I remember being [like], 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?"
Borderlands is streaming now on Prime Video. For more, check out our guide to the best upcoming video game movies on the way in 2025 and beyond.
