Eli Roth attributes COVID as a reason behind Borderlands' failure

"You can't prep a movie on that scale over Zoom and I think we all thought we could pull it off".

We went through a phase of video game movies being quite good, but this wasn't replicated at all last year when Eli Roth's Borderlands made its debut in cinemas. The film was an immense flop commercially, and neither critics nor fans seemed to find much, if any, joy from watching the film either, so much so that as of today the movie has a measly 10% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a better but still not great 49% audience score.

This failure has to be attributed to a plethora of reasons and for director Roth one such problem was the global pandemic, with COVID described as one of the reasons why the film didn't come together.

Speaking on The Town podcast, Roth stated: "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."

While COVID is a firm and understandable reason for why a film would be impacted, it should be noted that Borderlands wasn't the only film affected by the pandemic, as movies like Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning also suffered from the outbreak, and yet still managed to come together really well...