Was 'Borderlands' Always Doomed?
Most video game movies are bad but the Gearbox game may have been too compromised from the start.
Borderlands, the new movie based on the popular Gearbox/2K video game series of the same name, is getting trashed by critics and is unlikely to do well at the box office. The film got the greenlight in August 2015, went in front of cameras in April 2021, and sat on the shelf for a couple of years before getting reshoots in 2023 (helmed by Tim Miller because original director Eli Roth had already moved on to the horror movie Thanksgiving). Eventually, writer Craig Mazin (co-showrunner of the acclaimed series The Last of Us, another video game adaptation) asked that his name be removed from the credits. All the signs were there that this adaptation had not gone well, which appears to be the case.
It makes total sense that Borderlands got a green light in August 2015 as it was easy to see it as a blend of two recent popular movies—Guardians of the Galaxy and Mad Max: Fury Road. If you take the band of misfits and set them in a dystopian desert, you get something close to Gearbox’s looter-shooter, which finds you playing as a “vault hunter” on the dangerous planet of Pandora. Saying “Guardians of the Galaxy meets Mad Max: Fury Road” is easy to say, but likely difficult to implement if you don’t have the story chops of James Gunn or George Miller, respectively. Also, not for nothing, but those filmmakers are genuinely passionate about telling stories in those worlds, and Borderlands would always be a mercenary job.
From the start, Roth always seemed like a peculiar choice for a sci-fi action blockbuster. As Roth moved away from his horror roots to take on more genres like the fantasy comedy The House with a Clock in Its Walls and a remake of the gritty Charles Bronson revenge movie Death Wish, perhaps he saw the opportunity to try something new. The studio and the producers maybe looked at Roth and thought given his horror background he could give Borderlands the irreverent approach of the games.
However, Hollywood still doesn’t seem to fully grasp how form follows function in gaming. Simply pulling in characters, setting, and overall narrative gist won’t automatically make for a successful adaptation. The games are semi-open-world, so you have vast areas to explore and don’t have to tackle the main mission right away. There are so many side-quests and weird things to do (one mission in Borderlands 2 has you fighting a parody of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and a movie can’t accommodate that. Furthermore, at the Hollywood blockbuster level, you’re going to have fewer choices. Lionsgate isn’t adapting Borderlands to break the mold; it wants the IP to keep things safe, and so it wants clear stakes, little moral ambiguity, and a three-act structure.
There are ways to negotiate all this to make your way to a good movie even if it has trouble channeling the games. After all, plenty of people loved Guardians of the Galaxy without ever having read a single Marvel comic. The original Mortal Kombat took a violent R-rated game and turned it into a solid martial arts movie. But there never seemed to be a vision for Borderlands beyond aping other hits with some paint-by-numbers storytelling that never wants to take a single creative chance. Even casting Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart, two actors who typically don’t get to play action hero roles, feels less like an inspired take and simply going for names rather than making a swing that could surprise the audience.
Video game movies have now been around for several decades, but there are still few worthwhile adaptations. Some argue that this is simply the growing pains of Hollywood figuring out a genre similar to how they struggled to adapt superhero stories. But superhero stories took off alongside advancements in CGI, and they still come from a linear storytelling tradition. Video games, which vary wildly based on how the developer approaches the project, won’t easily adhere to blockbuster dictates. Last year’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie was a big hit, but you have to look past the massive flop of the live-action 1993 adaptation. Maybe in 30 years someone else will take a crack at Borderlands and get it right.