Featuring a stacked cast that includes Oscar-winners Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis, along with major box office stars Kevin Hart and Jack Black, the video game adaptation Borderlands crashed and burned with critics and the audience. The movie suffered a tumultuous production, and grossed only a fraction of its reported budget. It was even disowned by its writer, Chernobyl’s Craig Mazin, and was completed without original director Eli Roth. Borderlands remains one of the prime examples of how an A-list Hollywood production, featuring A-list talent, can still go off the rails. However, despite its poor theatrical performance, it has emerged as something of an oddity on home video, where it recently passed a major milestone.
According to FlixPatrol, Borderlands completed 150 days on the domestic Pluto TV charts this week, which is in stark contrast to the $15 million that it could manage to haul during its domestic run. The movie made just over $30 million at the worldwide box office, against a reported budget of $120 million. After Roth couldn’t return to oversee reshoots — they were directed by Tim Miller — the movie opened to poor reviews, continuing a terrible 2024 for Lionsgate. It’s currently sitting at a 10% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the critics’ consensus reads, “Glitching out in every department, Borderlands is balderdash.” The movie’s marketing made it seem like a space Western in the vein of James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies, but audiences didn’t agree.
Eli Roth Returned to Horror
Blanchett was coming off of an Oscar nomination for her performance in Tár, while Curtis had won an Oscar recently for her supporting performance in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Black and Hart had appeared together in Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle and Jumanji: The Next Level, which earned a combined total of over $1.6 billion at the worldwide box office. Last year, Black starred in A Minecraft Movie, which made nearly $1 billion worldwide; he can now be seen in the meta-comedy Anaconda, also featuring Paul Rudd. Roth rebounded by returning to familiar territory, horror, with the film Thanksgiving.
You can watch Borderlands at home, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
Release Date
August 9, 2024
Runtime
102 Minutes