Seriously, What The Hell Went So Wrong With Borderlands To Earn The Movie 10% On Rotten Tomatoes?
Seriously, What The Hell Went So Wrong With Borderlands To Earn The Movie 10% On Rotten Tomatoes?
Why Borderlands has performed so poorly.
Borderlands' failure can easily be summed up by two things: its box office performance and its critical reactions. After coming out on August 9th, both of these metrics are looking less than stellar. So far, Borderlands has made approximately $1.3 million at the box office in its opening days. This is a dismal failure considering the movie's significant $110-120 million budget. While there is definitely still time for Borderlands to make more money, this is not a very auspicious start. Furthermore, Borderlands' box office may not improve by very much considering that reviews for Borderlands have been shockingly bad.
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An aspect of Borderlands that could have had an effect on its success was its complicated development. The movie was released in 2024, but it was originally announced almost a decade ago, in 2015. In that time, Borderlands went through various different hands, especially in terms of screenwriters. All in all, Borderlands had about seven different screenwriters over the course of its development. Ultimately, that lack of stability could have been the reason why Borderlands felt so lifeless once it hit the big screen. After going through so many iterations, the story had the life sucked out of it.
Another problem is the overabundance of story that Borderlands has. If Borderlands was intended to be the first in a film franchise, there wasn't much reason to stuff in as much of the various video games as possible. There would have been time to get to those parts. However, director Eli Roth told Dexerto, "It was hard to streamline it, you know, I’m trying to throw in absolutely everything I can into the movie." It seems as though this only served to hurt the movie, as audiences are most concerned with accuracy when it comes to adaptations.
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In the end, this is a tough situation for Borderlands fans. The franchise had the potential to be something great, but after so many delays and development changes, the movie ended up taking a turn for the worse. Perhaps if the project had fallen into different hands, it would have been better. Maybe there is a chance that this could happen someday in the form of a reboot television series. However, for now, Borderlands has given everything it has and must suffer the consequences.
Ez: Borderlands fans didn’t want this movie. No one else wanted this movie.
Simple.
They hired a moron producer known for making garbage movies.
They took a 2009 M-Rated game.... who's target audience would be 33+ years of age.
And made it PG-13,
And they added Kevin Hart.
Avi Arad is proof we don't live in a meritocracy no matter how many times people say we do
Skimming his filmography it appears that he is a better executive producer than producer. It would be interesting to run the box office comparison on that split. But broadly, yes they're all trash.
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Usually your hear, idk, something in the works for projects like this, but i only knew about the existence of this movie less than a week from its debut. Was never going to watch it, but marketing really fucked up because no one i knew it was even filmed.
Yeah I don't think originally being announced in 2015 had anything to do with it. It failed because it was so obviously a soulless cash grab product of a focus group driven production machine banking literally all of its success not on its own merit but on the Borderlands name alone. I don't give a shit about Borderlands but even I could tell not an ounce of effort was put into making a Borderlands movie and it was purely just a coat of paint to slap on another movie with Kevin Hart yelling all the time and Jack Black making diarrhea jokes.
And with that type of execution they managed to completely miss the fans of the game (which wasn't the big pool they thought it was) by making it nothing like it yet also missing mainstream audiences by making it a video game movie. It's honestly impressive how ill advised every single decision was, and case studies should be written on this in the future.
Or to quote RedLetterMedia, it's the cinematic equivalent of Homer Simpson's Makeup Shotgun.
It sucks to sit in the theatre and watch something nobody loved
Trailer: Yelow piss filter instead of cartoon with cellshading, completely missed the cast, age and character design are complete miss.
What did you expect? They couldn't even get the roland costume rigt, neither uniform nor military cap is correct. They had one trivial job and screwd it up.
Talk about bad first impressions.
Additioanlly Borderlands doesn't have large following. Every few years they make a product for teenages, and they're losin that audience as it geows up.
Poorly made movie with poorly chosen cast, catering to absolutely nobody.
Yep. A bad version of something nobody wanted in the first place.
That's a lot of words, when two will do: Eli Roth. Not up there with Uwe Boll but...
Or just Randy Pitchford.