Borderlands film Director blames COVID for its failings

While the film and TV industry seems to have finally figured out how to make good adaptations of popular video game franchises, some projects still wind up being less-than-stellar. Easily the biggest most-recent flop was the ill-fated Borderlands film. According to the director, COVID had a massive part to play in its eventual failure.

As part of the podcast series ‘The Town’ Borderlands Director Eli Roth spoke on the reasons as to why the film failed to capture the hearts of fans. According to Roth (as transcribed by PCGamer):

“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…”

Roth continued, “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.”

For the uninitiated, the Borderlands film released last year to a ton of criticism, seeing a Rotten Tomato score of 10% and ultimately raking in just $33 million worldwide off of a $115 million production budget.

Of course, Borderlands ultimately released many years on from the peak of COVID, however, with the film being announced all the way back in 2015 – and filming not starting until 2021 – it seems as though there may have been at least a couple other factors which led to its eventual failed state. Hopefully Eli Roth’s next project proves to be more successful.

Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.

KitGuru says: What did you think of the Borderlands film? What was your biggest criticism? How would you have made a Borderlands adaptation? Let us know down below.

Become a Patron!