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.
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?"
"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."
