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Borderlands
GRTV News - Eli Roth attributes COVID as a reason behind Borderlands' failure
Was the pandemic to blame for this video game movie flop?
Audio transcription
"Hi there, welcome back to GLTV News, I'm Alex, as always, going through the afternoons, latest and greatest when it comes to gaming, technology, entertainment, whatever you like, and indeed whatever you love, we always have it here for you on GLTV News and in the wider Gamereactor network as a whole, so if you like what you see and you want to see more, be sure to check out Gamereactor wherever you get it from for more gaming reviews, gaming previews, movie reviews, series reviews, exclusives, interviews and of course so much more."
"Without further ado, let's get to today's story, today we're talking Borderlands, remember that movie, one second, let me just get the actual window up for it, in any case, sorry about that, we're talking Borderlands, which was the biggest flop of 2024, probably losing Lionsgate about 100 million dollars I believe if I'm correct, probably more considering how much it flopped, it really really failed to pick up a lot of steam and a lot of that was down to the critical reception of the film due to it being seen as sort of just really really bad in an age where video game adaptations were generally getting a lot better, stuff like The Last of Us, Fallout, the Super Mario Bros movie, they might not be your cup of tea, they might not be the best things in the world, but they have shown that the age of sort of the original Super Mario Bros movie, the age of the old Tomb Raider films, the age of the Street Fighter movie seem to be quite over and instead we're getting at least competent video game adaptations, however Eli Roth's Borderlands movie was anything but and in speaking with the Town podcast he tried to explain a little bit why that might have been and he pretty much believes it was down to shooting and creating the film throughout Covid. He says, I would work with Lionsgate again, I just wouldn't work under those circumstances and I think none of us anticipated how complicated things were going to 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 get a prep room together, I couldn't be with my stunt people, I couldn't do previews, 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. So it's nice to see there that Eli Roth is sort of taking accountability for the film being a flop and not just basically sort of storming on ahead believing that it was, you know, a success or that it was entirely the fans fault that they didn't like it or stuff like that which we often sometimes see with the responses to these movies and when they flop it's a case by case basis of whether the creators sort of believe it was initially on the audiences for not wanting to see it or whether it was on them for trying something and failing with it. So it seems Roth is definitely in the latter camp and it's interesting to see his perspective. A lot of people probably wouldn't attribute it to Covid, it seemed like the film's issues ran a lot deeper than that. Borderlands as an IP is often sort of seen as quite a polarising one, especially with its sense of humour, considering that it feels very rooted in that 2010s idea of humour and it seems that the Borderlands movie didn't really move on from that even though it came out in 2024. Despite big names like Jack Black, Cate Blanchett and more, it failed to really capture audiences but then we still have video game movies proving to be massive successes like a Minecraft movie which has just gone over half a billion dollars at the box office this past weekend so at least we know that video game adaptations aren't just going back to being stinkers, even if necessarily they don't earn good critic reviews like the Minecraft movie didn't, they're still able to draw audiences which Borderlands didn't either. But let me know if you've seen Borderlands, poor you, what did you think of it? Do you think it deserves the bad rap that it gets? Do you think that Covid could be the reason why it flopped? Let me know all that and more and I'll see you tomorrow for some more GRTV news, goodbye! Thanks for watching!"
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