Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer isn't mincing words when it comes to the Borderlands movie, which by all accounts was a total train wreck.
Borderlands was in theaters for a month, in which time it managed to wrack up $15.4M domestic and almost $33M worldwide after a disappointing opening weekend that brought in less than $9 million. Deadline reports its production budget was $120 million, and although Lionsgate was able to mitigate some of that loss by selling off foreign rights, the flick is still reported to be losing Lionsgate up to $30 million.
I think it's safe to say we aren't getting another Borderlands movie for a while, especially with the way Feltheimer is talking about the project in an earnings call today.
"On Borderlands, 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," he said.
"The success of our financial models doesn’t take the place of also getting the creative right," said Feltheimer.
Of course, as with anything, the failure of the Borderlands movie likely came down to many different factors, but from an outside perspective, it's easy to lay at least part of that blame on the creative direction of the film, as it frankly did not review well. It's currently sitting at a grim 10% on Rotten Tomatoes and our own Borderlands movie review gave it 2/5 stars and called it "a frenetic and disorderly shambles gamers are likely to loathe." Yeesh.
