Eli Roth Reflects On “Borderlands” Difficulties

We’re in the middle of the video game-to-film renaissance, with numerous adaptations proving to be critical and/or commercial hits from “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “The Super Mario Bros.” to “The Last of Us,” “Fallout,” “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” “Uncharted” and “Minecraft”.

Then there’s “Borderlands”. Eli Roth’s costly film adaptation cost anywhere between $110-120 million to produce and ended up finishing its run with a very tepid $31 million worldwide box-office haul last year – resulting in tens of millions of losses for the studio despite robust pre-sales.

Widely panned (it scored a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes) as one of the worst films of 2024, the film was shot in mid-2021 but then underwent reshoots with “Deadpool” director Tim Miller taking over that additional filming as Roth was busy filming “Thanksgiving”.

After that, it all went downhill – writer Craig Mazin removed his name from the project with the final credits listing multiple ‘additional literary material’ credits suggesting a major writing overhaul during the reshoots. Multiple scenes were also trimmed to keep a PG-13 rating. A year and a half after those reshoots, the film finally opened.

Appearing on The Town podcast recently, Roth was asked about “Borderlands” where he was asked about the making of the film. Initially he’s reluctant as he says he remains friends with many involved when you start to “talk about what happened, someone’s going to look bad… and usually it’s just the director.”

What he was able to discuss was his first viewing of the film as he was as much in the dark as the rest of the audience about it:

“[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?’. 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?”

As he continues, the “Hostel” and “Cabin Fever” filmmaker says he accepts what happened as it’s all part of the gig and that he’d happily work with the distributor again, just not under the difficult circumstances they had in place when making it:

“I would work with Lionsgate again, I just wouldn’t work under those circumstances and 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… 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.”

Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Haley Bennett, Édgar Ramírez, Gina Gershon, Cheyenne Jackson and Olivier Richters co-starred in the film.

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