It’s no secret that the Borderlands movie did not perform well, with audiences and critics alike ridiculing everything from the film’s casting choices to its dialogue. Even some of its creators disliked the film–writer Craig Mazin was so unhappy with the final cut that he requested his name be removed from the film’s credits. Now, director Eli Roth is opening up about what went wrong behind the scenes, citing the COVID-19 pandemic as a major factor in the film’s poor reception.
Appearing on a recent episode of The Town podcast, Roth was asked about Borderlands, and initially seemed unwilling to give a detailed answer, saying that if he talked about what happened, “someone’s going to look bad, and usually it’s just the director.”
Roth did detail his first time viewing the final cut of the film, which grossed only $33 million worldwide. From the way he describes it, it seems the director wasn’t sure what to expect when he sat down to watch his film.
“This is the first time I’m going to see a movie sort of being like, ‘OK, I directed this, what happens?'” Roth said. “That was kind of an experience like [I’ve] never had before. And I remember being [like], ‘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 really genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen?”
Roth says that while he’d happily work with Lionsgate on another project, he’d never want to work under the same conditions he endured during the filming of Borderlands–namely, the restrictions of the pandemic.
“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, Roth said of filming during the pandemic. “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.”
Roth cites the inability to be in the same space as his actors and his production team as one of the biggest challenges he faced during filming. “We couldn’t prep [the film] 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,” Roth explained. “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 the Borderlands film may not be getting a sequel anytime soon, the game franchise upon which it is based is still kicking, with Borderlands 4 scheduled to launch on September 23. For more info on the next Borderlands title, check out everything we know about Borderlands 4.
