Borderlands Film Flops With $ 16.5 Million Opening Weekend Vs. $ 150 Million Budget

The Borderlands movie is officially a flop.

Variety reports that Borderlands came in fourth place in US box office, behind Deadpool & Wolverine, It Ends With Us, and Twisters. It made $ 8.8 million from 3.125 theaters, and another $ 7.7 million in box office outside the US. That’s a total of $ 16.5 million, a far cry from the $ 54.2 million that Deadpool & Wolverine made in the same weekend.

It’s also clearly not enough to make a dent on what Variety says is a production budget of $ 115 million, plus marketing and distribution costs of $ 30 million. Checking back on our report before the weekend, the rumored budget of $ 120 million wasn’t really high enough, and it just about exceeded projections of $ 10 to 15 million.

Variety also points out that as much as 60 % of production costs for Borderlands was covered by international presales. That means it’s not as severe a financial blow to its producers as it seems. Those producers include 2K and Gearbox Studios, which is the game developer’s film and TV production arm.

Some angry fans may have been jumping to declare Borderlands as the biggest box office bomb of all time, but somehow, 2K and Gearbox still did not have the hubris of Disney’s 2012 flick John Carter. That incredible misfire cost $ 350 million, and adjusted for inflation, lost somewhere between $ 149 to 265 million.

Now, not every box-office flop or bomb turns out to be a bad movie. John Carpenter’s The Thing was famously critically and commercially a failure, only making its reputation years later on TV and home video. But on top of that, Borderlands didn’t even have to be as good as John Carpenter’s The Thing, either.  

Capcom paid for the production of Street Fighter: The Movie in 1993, and while that flick is regarded as one of many embarrassing video game to film adaptations, it continues to make Capcom money to this day.

So maybe Borderlands can rally a second career as a cult favorite movie on streaming, syndication, and home video, if it’s entertaining enough. But, that isn’t the case here either. Variety reports its Tomatometer score is higher, but still dismal, at 10 %, and it has a CinemaScore of D +.

It’s absolutely baffling that a franchise that clearly took all its notes from Mad Max and punched it into the 2000s zeitgeist failed to make for a good adaptation back to film, but maybe we should attribute this to mistakes made along the way.

Not every film can be as close to the source as the Super Mario Bros. Movie, but the Sonic: The Movie series showed us that they can still be successful diverging from the source a lot. This project simply lost its way, and with the scale of the projected loss, it’s unlikely that 2K and Gearbox Studios can try again so soon.