Director Eli Roth has shared his thoughts on what went wrong with last year’s Borderlands adaptation, which was a critical and commercial flop.
Why did it fail? Well, Roth believes that the circumstances around the film, such as the Covid pandemic, certainly didn’t do the team any favours.
In conversation with podcast The Town (via Dark Horizons), Roth admitted that the first time he got to view the final film, he wasn’t actually sure what he was going to see. This is because Roth had already started work on another film, and Deadpool film director Tim Miller had taken over Borderlands’ reshoots.
“[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?’. That was kind of an experience like, never had that before,” Roth said.
“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?”
The director still has plenty of respect for those that worked on the film, and said he would still work with Lionsgate again, but not “under those circumstances”.
Roth continued: “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 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.”
Last year’s Cate Blanchett-fronted Borderlands adaptation was branded a “disaster” and “huge misfire” by viewers. In fact, one review called it a “lifeless, unfunny, and visually repulsive dud”. The film generated just $4m across 3125 locations on its opening day, before quickly getting shifted onto streaming services.
Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick had a more upbeat outlook on the Borderlands adaptation, however. Indeed, he said that the “disappointing” movie hadn’t hurt the Borderlands video game series, but rather it had given it a boost.
The next entry in the Borderlands games franchise is due torelease across PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S (via Steam and the Epic Games Store at the same time) on 23rd September.