Even Borderlands' Director Thinks the Movie Sucked

"You got something that belonged to nobody." That's Eli Roth describing his own film, the 2024 Borderlands movie, in a new interview with Variety. Not a critic. Not a Reddit post. The director himself.

Roth was speaking to Variety about his upcoming horror film Ice Cream Man when the conversation turned to Borderlands, the $120 million adaptation that crashed and burned at the box office last year. According to the interview, Roth blamed the film's failure on a familiar Hollywood problem: a budget so large that the studio couldn't afford to let anyone take creative risks with it.

"As things grow bigger, studios just naturally become more risk averse. My nature as a filmmaker is to do the thing that's left of center, because that's what has worked for me."

Roth went on to describe how Lionsgate executives pushed for a PG-13 rating, demanding changes to soften a movie based on a franchise built on cartoon ultraviolence and crude humour. The result, in his own words, was a film caught between audiences:

"It's not a kids' movie, but it's trying to appeal to everybody. It's for gamers, but it doesn't have the violence the gamers want because it can't be that extreme because it costs too much. You just wind up with a movie that's neither fish nor fowl."

I appreciate the honesty, but this is also a director essentially saying "I knew what this needed to be, and I wasn't allowed to make it." Whether that's a fair defence or a convenient one depends on how much credit you give Roth's instincts. His horror pedigree with Hostel and Cabin Fever suggests he understood the tone Borderlands required. A hard-R, irreverent gorefest might not have been a masterpiece, but it would have at least felt like Borderlands. What shipped instead felt like nothing.

A $120 Million Nobody Asked For

The numbers told the story before Roth ever did. The Borderlands movie, which starred Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Jack Black, was a disaster by every metric. It carried a $120 million production budget and couldn't recoup a fraction of it theatrically. Critics savaged it across the board. As PC Gamer's Joshua Wolens wrote in his coverage, "It's not just bad, it's bland tasteless mush that no one involved seemed interested in saving."

What makes the whole thing sting is that Borderlands has proven it can tell good stories outside the main games. Telltale's Tales from the Borderlands was widely praised for its writing and characters, and plenty of fans will argue that Borderlands 2's campaign holds up as one of the better narratives in the looter-shooter genre. The material was there. A $120 million budget and a PG-13 mandate just weren't the right tools to work with it.

Roth's admission also lands at an awkward time for the director. His next film, Ice Cream Man, is already generating controversy over its confirmed use of generative AI in visual effects, something Roth initially downplayed before clarifying to Polygon that "AI was used in a very small portion of a few scenes in the film." Between a video game movie nobody liked and an AI disclosure he had to be pressed into making, Roth isn't exactly on a goodwill streak.

As for whether anyone will try adapting Borderlands again, I wouldn't hold my breath. The franchise's reputation in Hollywood is now a cautionary tale about what happens when a studio spends nine figures on an IP and then sands off everything that made it popular. Roth's comments confirm what players said from the first trailer: this was never going to work as a family-friendly blockbuster. At least now we know the director agreed the whole time.