Director Eli Roth has talked about the disappointment of his videogame adaptation, Borderlands, and says its problems were partly due to Covid.
Where such videogame adaptations as The Super Mario Bros Movie and now A Minecraft Movie have made millions for their studios, Lionsgate’s Borderlands landed with a bit of a thud in 2024. Reviews were harsh, and the box office numbers were even more gloomy: it made $33m from a budget of around $110m (plus more for marketing and so forth).
Although director Eli Roth put a brave face on as he did the promotional rounds at the time, there had been rumours for over a year that things were going awry behind the scenes. First came reports that Craig Mazin had his name taken out of its credits; Mazin denied this, but to this day the film’s listed screenwriter is one Joe Crombie, which appears to be an Alan Smithee-like pseudonym.
Next came the story that Borderlands' round of 2023 reshoots had been overseen by Tim Miller, and that Eli Roth wouldn’t be involved in filming. After a bit of coaxing, Roth confirmed this turn of events to host Matthew Belloni in the latter’s podcast, The Town (via Dark Horizons).
“In my reporting at the time, you didn’t participate in the reshoots for whatever reason,” Belloni said.
“I did not. That is correct,” Roth confirmed, adding that by the time Miller (who isn’t mentioned by name) took over Borderlands, Roth had moved on to direct his slasher comedy, Thanksgiving.
Read more: A Minecraft Movie, and why the videogame adaptation curse never existed
“[I] was doing Thanksgiving, and […] I remember [asking myself], ‘am I at the point of my career where I’m going to sit down to watch my own movie that says I wrote and directed it, and I genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen?’”
As for how Borderlands ended up in this situation in the first place, Roth says that Covid was a complicating factor. The film was in pre-production as the pandemic hit, and shooting began in 2021 while the virus was still causing havoc across the globe.
“None of us anticipated how complicated things were gonna be with Covid,” Roth said. “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. I think we all thought we could pull it off and we got our asses handed to us a bit.”
Delayed more than once, Borderlands was also reworked to get a PG-13 rating, with scenes of gore and violence reportedly toned down. In his podcast interview, Roth suggests that the movie changed so much after his departure that he barely even recognised it.
“I believe that, once they [the studio] pay you, that’s part of the deal,” Roth said. “If there’s creative differences or they’re doing reshoots without you, and say, ‘This is what we’re doing’ and you’re the figurehead, you get out there, you put on a smile and people smack you in the face. You gotta stand there and go, ‘Okay’.”
In the aftermath, Roth plans to launch The Horror Section, an independent studio dedicated to making ‘uncut, hardcore’ genre films. It’s currently crowdfunding investment, and has raised roughly half its $5m target. There, he plans to get back to the grisly low-budget filmmaking he initially specialised in – Cabin Fever, Hostel and the like.
“I thought, this isn’t really me and this isn’t what I want to do going forward,” Roth said, referring to his time on Borderlands. “So let me get back to my roots… by the way, I would work with Lionsgate again. I just wouldn’t work with them under those circumstances.”
