Eli Roth on why the Borderlands movie sucked: 'You can’t prep a movie on that scale over Zoom'

The Borderlands movie was bad in a way videogame movies rarely are these days. In an era when Hollywood hears the phrase "existing fandom" and their eyes roll around and come up dollar signs, the idea of an adaptation casually disrespecting the original seems almost nostalgic.

But that's exactly what the 2024 Borderlands movie did. It made Tiny Tina a genetically engineered part-alien "chosen one", turned Claptrap a kind of budget Bender who wants to kill all the humans but is programmed not to, and treated the fact Lilith is a siren as a twist to reveal at the end rather than a baseline aspect of her character you might know before walking into the cinema.

Respecting the source material isn't the only way to make a good adaptation, of course. Netflix's Castlevania series had a subset of the fandom up in arms, but it was great. Borderlands blithely changed the core of every character it put on screen, but only to replace them with cliches like "world-weary bounty hunter" rather than anything interesting.

Talking to podcast The Town, via Dark Horizons, director Eli Roth tried to explain exactly what went wrong. He started by discussing the oddity of watching a movie he didn't have final cut on, and which was completed without him—Tim Miller, director of Deadpool, having taken over while Roth moved on to slasher film Thanksgiving—and asking, "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 said he's still friends with many of the people involved, but also sounds aware of what a disaster the movie was, saying that he'd only work with the Lionsgate studio again if the circumstances were different.

"I think none of us, none of us anticipated how complicated things were gonna be with COVID," Roth said. "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 and it was just like… we couldn't prep 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. 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."

Which maybe does explain some of the nonsensical action scenes, but not the rest of the many issues Borderlands had. As Joshua Wolens said in our review, it's not even bad in a fun way. "This is not a film you should ever queue up alongside infamous masterpieces like The Room and Manos: The Hands of Fate. It's just uninspired scene after loosely connected uninspired scene, each populated by a cast of actors who also seem kind of upset about experiencing the Borderlands movie."