Borderlands and the Three Years Lionsgate Sat On It

Let me get one thing out of the way. Borderlands is a bad film. Eli Roth’s adaptation of the Gearbox shooter is loud, weightless, and cut to ribbons, and no amount of contrarian goodwill is going to rescue it. But “bad film” is not the interesting part of the story, because Hollywood makes bad films constantly and most of them limp to a respectable number and disappear. Borderlands did not limp. It cratered. On a reported production budget somewhere between $110 and $120 million, it opened to about $8.8 million domestically in August 2024 and finished its worldwide run around $33 million. That is not a disappointment. That is a write-off with a marketing campaign attached.

The lazy reading is that game adaptations are cursed, and that Borderlands is one more body on the pile next to Doom and Assassin’s Creed. That reading is three years out of date. The Super Mario Bros. Movie made over a billion dollars in 2023. Sonic is a functioning franchise. The Last of Us turned a PlayStation game into prestige television. The curse broke. Whatever killed Borderlands, it was not the simple fact of a game logo on the poster.

The shoot, and then the silence

Here is the part that matters, and it is a scheduling fact, not a creative one. Roth shot Borderlands in Budapest between April and June of 2021. The film came out on 9 August 2024. That is more than three years between principal photography and release, on a film with no pandemic-shutdown excuse, because the cameras had already stopped rolling.

What happened in those three years is the whole story. Roth left to make Thanksgiving, his actual passion project, and was unavailable when the film needed reshoots. So in early 2023 Lionsgate brought in Tim Miller, the Deadpool director, to shoot two weeks of new material on a film he had not originally made. Around the same time, Craig Mazin, who wrote the screenplay before The Last of Us turned him into one of the most valuable names in the medium, took his credit off the picture. The writing is now attributed to a “Joe Crombie,” which is the kind of name that appears when a real writer wants nothing to do with what survived.

So by the time it reached cinemas, Borderlands was a 2021 film, reshot in 2023 by a second director, repudiated by its original writer, and released into a 2024 market that had moved on from everything the project was greenlit to capitalise on. You can see all of this on screen. The film has the disconnected rhythm of something assembled from two shoots that never spoke to each other, scenes that begin in one register and resolve in another, performances calibrated for a tone the final cut does not commit to.

What got declawed

The other failure is one of nerve. Borderlands, the game, is a grimy, violent, foul-mouthed thing. Its whole texture is splatter and sarcasm. The film was cut to a PG-13, with the graphic material trimmed to protect the rating, which is the single most predictable mistake a studio can make with this property and Lionsgate made it anyway. You cannot adapt a game that runs on R-rated viscera and then sand off the viscera to widen the audience. You end up with neither crowd: too crude for families, too toothless for the people who actually play the thing.

The cast should have been insurance. Cate Blanchett plays Lilith, Kevin Hart plays Roland, Jack Black voices the robot Claptrap, and Jamie Lee Curtis, Édgar Ramírez, Ariana Greenblatt and Florian Munteanu fill out the crew. That is a genuinely strange and promising group of people to put in a space-western. Rogier Stoffers shot it and Steve Jablonsky scored it, after Nathan Barr was replaced, which is one more credit that changed hands somewhere in the three-year gap. None of it lands, because none of it was protected by a coherent edit. You can hire Blanchett to play a bounty hunter and still waste her if the scene around her was filmed by one director and finished by another.

The lesson Lionsgate keeps not learning

I have written before about Universal sitting on Wolf Man and releasing a 2020 idea in 2025. Borderlands is the same disease in a different studio. The mistake is structural. A film is greenlit to catch a wave, the wave is a moving target, and the studio behaves as though the wave will wait. It does not wait. Audiences in 2024 had no particular hunger for a Borderlands movie, because the cultural moment that might have wanted one passed somewhere around 2021, while the footage sat in a vault waiting for its director to come back from another job.

What should have happened is obvious in hindsight and was obvious at the time. Finish the film in 2021 with the director who shot it. Commit to the R rating the material demands. Release it while the iron is at least warm. Lionsgate did none of those things, and then acted surprised when the number came in at a tenth of the budget.

Borderlands will get cited for years as proof that game movies do not work, and that citation will be wrong every time. The film did not fail because it was a game adaptation. It failed because a studio shot it, abandoned it, reshot it with someone else, lost its writer, defanged its content, and shipped the wreckage three years late into an audience that had stopped asking. The genre is fine. The process is what is broken.