As a critic, it’s my job to generally treat all things with grace—but I feel pretty confident saying that the Borderlands movie, which launched to shocking reviews, has not done well. I trust the opinion of my fellow PC Gamer writer Joshua Wolens who, having sat down and watched the whole thing, dubbed it “tasteless mush that no one involved seemed interested in saving” and “an excuse to buy a bucket of popcorn.”
That critical reception appears to have manifested at the US box office, via Variety, reporting that Borderlands the movie raked in $8.8 million in its opening weekend in the states. This is a movie that cost $115 million to make and an additional $30 million to market and distribute.
Adding those costs together, that means Borderlands’ US performance over the weekend earned it about 6% of what it cost. To put that in perspective, it now needs to sell the same amount of tickets roughly 16 additional times just to break even.
Granted, there are international releases to come, and as Forbes reports, 60% of its production budget has already been covered by presales—which just leaves, uh, approximately $58 million (again, combining production and marketing/distribution costs) to find after the fact before the cash starts flowing.
I’d shuffle in some snide quip here, but I’m feeling a similar way to how I felt looking at Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which not only lost Warner Bros about $200 million, but is currently being played by—let me check—86 whole people on Steam (with a 217 24-hour peak) at the time of writing. That is to say: sad. It makes me feel sad.
Thinking about the amount of waste that came out of something like this is just frustrating, especially since the Borderland series seems characterised by a tendency to miss easy slam-dunks. It’s got a killer aesthetic and, for the most part, gameplay that’s good fun—I sank about 58 hours into Borderlands 3 and its respective DLCs.
But other aspects, namely its story and overall direction, have been chronically mismanaged for years, and it’s sad to see that bleed over into the movie. I am starting to see why HBO’s The Last of Us writer Craig Mazin hopped off the movie train before it could become a proper wreck.
