Summary

Director Eli Roth blamed COVID for Borderlands' poor performance because it limited them in pursuing the usual process of filmmaking.
The Borderlands movie was a flop due to COVID disruptions and non-loyalty to source material.
The Borderlands team took creative liberties and cast choices that fans did not approve of.

There were high expectations when the movie Borderlands was released. However, the film was a disaster and its director blamed COVID.

The 2024 Borderlands film is inspired by the game series of the same name. It was directed by Eli Roth and featured an ensemble cast, including Cate Blanchett (Lilith), Jamie Lee Curtis (Tannis), Kevin Hart (Roland), Bobby Lee (Larry), and Jack Black (Claptrap). Fans hoped it would be a live-action adaptation but were disappointed because it wasn't faithful to the source material. Borderlands was both a critical and commercial failure. It only received a 10% rating from critics and 49% from the audience on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing. The common feedback was that it was a lousy adaptation of the video game. Nearly a year after the movie was released, Roth addressed the performance of the film.

Roth reflected on Borderlands' performance in an interview with The Town. According to him, it was difficult to meet with the cast due to the COVID-19 pandemic at the time, so they had to discuss stuff via Zoom. The filmmaker blamed the pandemic for how things turned out for the film. To make things worse, he had to leave the film to direct Thanksgiving. Tim Miller took over the reshoots, but Roth was still involved in the project. However, the output was at par with the fans' expectations and received tons of negative reviews, with some saying it was "unwatchable." Roth, nevertheless, stood by their work and blamed COVID for how it affected production. He admitted that they were not expecting the turn of events.

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.

Looking back, Roth said the pandemic stopped them from meeting each other in person, especially since they were at different locations. He couldn't be with the stunt people and do the usual previs, the process of visualizing a scene before creating it. Previs usually takes the form of a storyboard or 3D animatics. Roth admitted that the set-up made it challenging for them to develop the film, considering its broad scale. Despite the limitations, they were still hoping it could work. Apparently, it didn't.

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.

Borderlands took creative liberties by presenting an original storyline that diverges from the game's narrative. Although it was set in the Borderlands universe, it centers on Lilith's return to Pandora to find her missing daughter, Atlas. This approach attracted intense criticism from fans who felt it didn't capture the essence of the source material. When it was newly released, it received a zero rating from the first 10 critics. Many felt that it tried to be funny but fell short of delivering.

The backlash was not a complete surprise because there had already been negative reactions since the cast members were announced. Several questioned Hart's casting as Roland because he was too short to play the six-foot-tall soldier and too funny for a serious character. Also, Blanchett's casting raised eyebrows because she was too old for the character, who was in her late 20s in Borderlands 2. Many also felt after watching the first trailer that the cast lacked chemistry. So, the film was doomed from the start and the COVID-19 pandemic was not the sole culprit. Some creative decisions played a part in the movie's poor performance.

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