We know it’s wrong to poke fun at things that people have created, no matter the media it’s in or the result that it had. After all, people worked hard on these products, so making fun of them isn’t just making fun of the property but the people who “failed” in making it worth investing time in. It’s very mean and something we shouldn’t endorse…unless…it REALLY deserves it. Yeah, and the Borderlands Movie REALLY deserves it. After all, not only is it one of the worst video game movie adaptations ever, but its box office total is so bad that it makes other flops look good!
As noted by The Gamer, the Borderlands Movie ended its theatrical run in UNDER a month (it came out on August 8th and stopped being in theaters on September 5th) with just $30.9 million to show for it. Oh, and you should recall that the film was made for about $150 million, so that’s 1/5th of what it needed just to break even!
Just to put this in context of other “terrible movies that flopped,” you need only look at films like Morbius, Madam Web, and more, and you’ll see movies that were terrible…yet made more than this movie! If you’re a fan of Honest Trailers, they did one on this film yesterday, and they blasted it to kingdom come for all the things they did terribly, including not caring about the game’s plot, having dubbing over lines due to reshoots, having multiple directors leading to reshoots, not being R-rated despite the series being M-Rated, doing nothing meaningful with the characters and plot, and so on.
Seriously, it was a film that did nothing to elevate the franchise, and it took so long to get made that it was pretty much DOA on arrival. This is a theme that has been plaguing the gaming industry in many forms recently.
The sad irony of this is that we KNOW this could’ve been a good movie IF they had just played the games and attempted to make something that accurately recreated what the titles from Gearbox were like. Instead, they went off in an entirely different direction, tried to “make something special,” only to fail horribly, cast the wrong people for the wrong roles, we’re looking at you, Kevin Hart, and so on and so forth.
Another irony is that there have been plenty of GOOD video game adaptations recently in both film and TV, so seeing this flop so hard takes us back to the earlier days of adaptations when nothing was good, and it seemed like these films were nothing more than cash grabs.
