Borderlands’ failure can easily be summed up by two things: its box office performance and its critical reactions. After coming out on August 9th, both of these metrics are looking less than stellar. So far, Borderlands has made approximately $1.3 million at the box office in its opening days. This is a dismal failure considering the movie’s significant $110-120 million budget. While there is definitely still time for Borderlands to make more money, this is not a very auspicious start. Furthermore, Borderlands’ box office may not improve by very much considering that reviews for Borderlands have been shockingly bad.
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An aspect of Borderlands that could have had an effect on its success was its complicated development. The movie was released in 2024, but it was originally announced almost a decade ago, in 2015. In that time, Borderlands went through various different hands, especially in terms of screenwriters. All in all, Borderlands had about seven different screenwriters over the course of its development. Ultimately, that lack of stability could have been the reason why Borderlands felt so lifeless once it hit the big screen. After going through so many iterations, the story had the life sucked out of it.
Another problem is the overabundance of story that Borderlands has. If Borderlands was intended to be the first in a film franchise, there wasn’t much reason to stuff in as much of the various video games as possible. There would have been time to get to those parts. However, director Eli Roth told Dexerto, “It was hard to streamline it, you know, I’m trying to throw in absolutely everything I can into the movie.” It seems as though this only served to hurt the movie, as audiences are most concerned with accuracy when it comes to adaptations.
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In the end, this is a tough situation for Borderlands fans. The franchise had the potential to be something great, but after so many delays and development changes, the movie ended up taking a turn for the worse. Perhaps if the project had fallen into different hands, it would have been better. Maybe there is a chance that this could happen someday in the form of a reboot television series. However, for now, Borderlands has given everything it has and must suffer the consequences.
Avi Arad is proof we don’t live in a meritocracy no matter how many times people say we do
Skimming his filmography it appears that he is a better executive producer than producer. It would be interesting to run the box office comparison on that split. But broadly, yes they’re all trash.
It’s a little more complicated to read through a producer’s movie history. For example, with any of the MCU movies he’s on, he wasn’t involved at all, Hollywood just paid him to stay away basically. For the pre-MCU Spiderman’s, he was the reason the bad ones were bad. He insisted on putting venom, sandman and green goblin 2 in the same movie, and did the same thing again in The Amazing Spiderman 2. He was a major player in thr Fox xmen and other pre-MCU marvel content, most of which sucked one way or another.