Yesterday, we reported on the Borderlands movie’s groundbreakingly bad critical reception. But, it turns out there’s worse news coming for this video game adaptation.
As we reported yesterday, the film debuted on Rotten Tomatoes with a 0 % score on the Tomatometer. To quote the site, “The Tomatometer score represents the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film or television show.”
As of this writing, Borderlands’ Tomatometer score has now gone up to 6 %. That is obviously still awful, but it at least escapes the indignity of joining the ranks of Rotten Tomatoes’ worst rated movies. For now, anyway.
As reported by World of Reel, the movie’s budget ballooned to $ 120 million. As it is projected to make $ 10 to 15 million, Lionsgate and 2K apparently already expect it to be a huge flop.
It seems a lot of this sudden rise in cost is because of reshoots. In 2021, Eli Roth, the credited director on the film, finished principal filming. Early previews of this cut was not received well by test audiences, but at this point, Eli had already moved on to make his next horror feature, Thanksgiving. Tim Miller, who also directed the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, stepped in to finish filming.
There seems to be rumors that Eli Roth squandered a good early script for the film, but that hasn’t been substantiated. What is known is that Chernobyl writer Craig Mazin wrote the script that both Eli and star Cate Blanchett signed up for.
Mazin then revealed in later interviews that Lionsgate and 2K did not use his script, and none of his writing was used in the final product. Mazin went out of his way to deny that he wrote the script under a pseudonym. A total of nine other writers were credited to have added writing to the script.
This may be a situation where the script is based on Mazin’s original, but so many changes were made that none of the original lines were left. It’s also possible that a new script came out after Mazin’s exit, but there’s no evidence here that Eli personally rewrote it. In any case, rewriting clearly happened after Eli left, given the expensive reshoots.
World of Reel also reveals one final twist, which is that the reshoots themselves were a nightmare to organize. Everyone in the main cast had other commitments, with Blanchett starting filming on her Oscar winning film Tár in September 2021 in Berlin.
So you can imagine this awkward situation, worthy of a subplot in the games themselves. Blanchett was filming what was about to be the peak of her acting career, at the same time she was being forced back to salvage this project.
With that visual in mind, we are sure you are looking forward to finding out just how Borderlands is going to play out in cinemas this weekend, just as much as we are.
