Borderlands, as of this writing, has a horrifying 10% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes. The film, led by Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Edgar Ramírez was lambasted by critics and long-time fans of the video game franchise alike. A series known for its absurdist comedy apparently failed to hit those familiar expected highs.
The Lionsgate CEO, Jon Feltheimer, owned up to the movie’s faults in a quarterly earnings call. Per IGN, Feltheimer addressed “the poor box-office performance of Borderlands.” For context, Variety reported that Borderlands had a production budget of $115 million. However, it only made a combined $31 million domestically and internationally.
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“On Borderlands, nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong,” Feltheimer stated. “It sat on the shelf for too long during the pandemic, and reshoots and rising interest rates took it outside the safety zone of our usually strict financial models.” Indeed, many critics were quite disenchanted with the film. “Everything that could go wrong did go wrong” is probably a generous read, honestly.
‘borderlands’ movie fails to live up to expectations
“There’s a lot of talent in this, but it’s all in the service of a cacophonous crash-and-bang not-terribly-interesting CGI’d hyper violent movie,” one reviewer said. But the most scathing, truthful criticism of the movie came from Reddit. “It does not scream Borderlands to me,” says Reddit user, TONICPUNCH, in an impassioned post.
“Its an action movie, yes, with guns, fighting, whatever whatever. But if you gave the characters, places, companies new names and changed the title from Borderlands to something like ‘Action Indiana Jones Ancient Alien Treasure’ the film still works. It’s just a generic script with the brand pasted on top of it and the characters do not have the personality they have in the games. Its bland, definitely watchable, but does not stand out in any way.”
Take-Two CEO, Strauss Zelnick, was a little less upset about Borderlands‘ lackluster performance! Speaking to IGN, Zelnick said the movie boosted the games’ sales! “Obviously, that movie was disappointing. That said, it actually sold more catalog. So, I don’t think it hurt at all, if anything I think it may have helped a little bit. It does highlight something that I’ve spoken about many times which is the difficulty of bringing our intellectual property to another medium.”
