The film adaptation of the popular video game franchise "Borderlands" has received a lot of negative reviews from both critics and audiences. Six months after its release, director Eli Roth blamed the film's failure on the COVID pandemic, PCGamer reports.
On The Town podcast, Eli Roth shared what went wrong during the making of the film. He spoke about the problems he encountered while reviewing the final cut and noted that he was not involved in the final editing. Tim Miller, the director of Deadpool, took over as Roth was busy filming the horror film Thanksgiving.
Roth says he's still on good terms with many of the people who worked on Borderlands, but he admits the film adaptation was a disaster. But he says he would work with Lionsgate again if circumstances were different.
"I think none of us, none of us anticipated how complicated things were gonna be with COVID. 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," Roth said.
Although the film adaptation did not live up to expectations, Gearbox and publisher 2K announced the development of a fourth game in the main series – Borderlands 4. The first trailer for the game was shown at The Game Awards in late 2024. The project is expected to be released in 2025.