The Borderlands movie turned out to be an incredible disappointment, both for the fans, and also the people who were making it. Now, one person who was in the trenches has chimed in on what they believe happened.
Eli Roth was penned in to direct Borderlands in 2020. Roth’s work in principal filming did get completed on time, but test audiences disliked that first version of the film. At this point, Roth had to move on because of his commitment to make his throwback holiday slasher movie, Thanksgiving. Roth told Lionsgate to get Tim Miller, a friend and the director of the Sonic movies, to handle reshoots.
There were a lot of rumors about what happened behind the scenes under Miller’s direction, but Roth’s explanation keeps things simple. As reported by Eurogamer, Roth said this:
“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.”
It must be said, for all of the things that were said that happened after Roth left the production, what he’s said was probably basically correct. If Roth’s first movie had its own problems, he and the cast and crew didn’t really get a proper chance to address it. We all remember how the pandemic wrecked everyone’s lives, to the point that some shows resorted to animation to continue production under lockdown and quarantine regulations.
Maybe fans overlitigated what had happened with this movie too much. For some time, there was speculation that there was behind the scenes issues with Roth and Lionsgate, and we now know that that was definitely not true. A lot of the stories about the cast’s behavior behind the scenes haven’t been confirmed or substantiated by any of the people who were actually named, so who knows how much of it is really true? It’s certainly rich in irony that Cate Blanchett was making Tár at the same time as this movie. Maybe that’s a good omen for Gearbox, as they’re set to release Borderlands 4 later this year.
