Borderlands director Eli Roth on why COVID cursed the movie before it even began

Borderlands was one of the biggest box-office bombs of 2024. The adaptation of the acclaimed video game franchise grossed just $33 million in theaters and was absolutely trashed by critics. While speaking on The Town podcast, Borderlands director Eli Roth reflected on the failure of the movie, saying COVID played a big part.

“None of us anticipated how complicated things were gonna be with COVID,” Roth said. “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… 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.“

The film needed reshoots, but Roth was already in the midst of Thanksgiving, so Deadpool director Tim Miller stepped in to finish the movie. “[I] was doing Thanksgiving, and it’s also the kind of thing we’re like, ‘Wow, this is the first time I’m going to see a movie sort of being like, OK, I directed this, what happens?’” he said. “That was kind of an experience like, never had that before. And I remember being… Am I at the point of my career where I’m going to sit down to watch my own movie that says I wrote and directed it, and I really genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen?“

Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer previously said, “On Borderlands, nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong. 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 usual strict financial models.“

Based on the video game franchise of the same name, Borderlands stars Cate Blanchett as Lillith, an infamous outlaw who returns to the place where she grew up and forms an alliance with a team of misfits to find the missing daughter of the most powerful man in the universe. The ensemble cast also includes Kevin Hart as Roland, Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina, Florian Munteanu as Krieg, Jamie Lee Curtis as Dr. Patricia Tannis, and Jack Black as the voice of Claptrap.

Our own Chris Bumbray called the film a “disaster” that desperately wants to be the next Guardians of the Galaxy but lacks the charm or vision to do so. Bumbray added that it was “one of the worst big-budget movies I’ve seen in a while” and will likely be forgotten entirely in just a few weeks. Yikes. You can check out the rest of his review right here.

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