Highlights
- “Borderlands” plays its budget far from the screen, while critics and audiences condemn the film with scathing condemnation.
- That’s not a pretty picture, to say the least. But to make matters worse, the 15th anniversary re-release of Coraline was more successful than the Borderlands launch.
- Even Harold and the Purple Crayon are doing better at the moment.
The Borderlands movie was a total flop. It scored zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and somehow things only got worse for Gearbox and Lionsgate after its release, as it sold so few tickets that it became one of the biggest flops of the year, while even Uwe Boll, the king of bad video game movies, mocked it from the sidelines. Regardless, Randy Pitchford spent the better part of a week adamantly defending the film on Twitter.
To make matters worse, this brand new, spectacular $110 million blockbuster was outdone at the domestic box office by the 15th anniversary re-release of Coraline, Henry Selick’s classic stop-motion film.
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It’s never been so embarrassing to be a Borderlands fan
If even Uwe Boll laughs at Borderlands, maybe it’s time to move on.
According to Box Office Mojo, Coraline grossed $11.3 million in the four days it was in theaters, while Borderlands grossed $9.2 million in the first four days of its release. To make matters worse, Coraline only played in 1,535 theaters, while Borderlands opened in over twice as many theaters, 3,125.
Coraline isn’t the only one to surpass Borderlands
Borderlands is far from recouping its budget, especially when you factor in marketing, so it should come as no surprise that it’s being beaten at the box office by many other new releases.
At the moment, the following films have completely overtaken Claptrap’s cinematic debut;
- Alien: Romulus (22nd vs. 70th)
- Harold and the Purple Crayon (61. vs. 70.)
- Trap (31st against 70th)
The awful Madame Web fared better, grossing $100 million, making it the 23rd highest-grossing film of the year (though it still cost Sony money). But even that high of a ranking wouldn’t be enough to recoup Borderland’s budget – in fact, if Lionsgate and Gearbox wanted to recoup their investment, it would have had to be in the top 20 films of 2024, alongside films like Garfield, Furiosa and Civil War.
Something tells me that any hopes of a sequel were dashed when the first film stumbled naked into a slag-soaped Bullymong cave – there’s no way we’d be seeing that cinematic universe now. But hey, at least Pitchford is starting to like the idea of an animated film.
