Borderlands film flops at the box office, one of the blockbusters with the worst reviews in years
The big-budget, star-studded Borderlands film currently in theaters may be the most ill-conceived video game adaptation to date, with many calling it a flop—one of the biggest in Hollywood history. With a reported budget of $145 million, including marketing, the film grossed $100 million in its opening weekend at the box office. Box office in the USAand thus falls far short of recent hits Deadpool, Wolverine and Twisters.
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The popularity of Gearbox’s Borderlands series is undeniable, and the second game in the series is one of the best-selling games of all time – mixing over-the-top violence (rated 18+) with humor and first-person shooter gameplay that rewards Diablo-style loot for the game’s seemingly countless weapons.
The film adaptation leaves the story from the games behind and presents a brand new take on the universe, featuring familiar characters such as Lilith, played by Cate Blanchet, and an all-star cast that includes Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jack Black, who voices the robot Claptrap. The film also leaves the game’s extremely violent depiction behind and instead offers a more family-friendly age rating (PG-13).
It is considered a miserable failure by critics and is currently at 9% on Rotten tomatoes. Here are some highlights.
“Borderlands is a bland mishmash of hackneyed genre clichés and has no real bite,” Los Angeles Times.
“Video game adaptations have produced some serious failures over the years. But even by the genre’s lamentable standards, Eli Roth’s reshoot-plagued Borderlands is abysmal,” The Observer.
“Nothing that works about the games has been carried over unchanged into this ugly, boring and truly incompetent film,” RogerEbert.com.
“We still have a lot of box office flops to go before the end of the year. But this sci-fi smash combines incompetent direction, terrible writing, mediocre acting and terrible CGI effects into a numbing bore that feels like nothing could top it in terms of badness.” Toronto Star.
So far, Borderlands’ international box office numbers appear to be worse than the film’s US release, meaning the film will struggle to recoup any of its budget. Given the recent success of The Last of Us and Fallout on TV, the animated Super Mario Bros. movie, and the live-action Sonic the Hedgehog reversal in video game adaptations, Borderlands feels like a huge step backwards.
