At this point, I’m kind of waiting for the Borderlands movie’s redemption arc to kick in. Despite its stacked cast and many years in development, this thing has been universally declared a stinker: and not even the so-bad-it’s-good kind. PCG’s own Joshua Wolens found it left him pining for the original Super Mario Bros movie, the Rotten Tomatoes score stands at 10%, and the opening box office receipts were utterly dire ($16 million globally on a $145 million production / marketing budget, and that’s even before the theatres take their cut).
It’s the latter that matters, of course. Hollywood wouldn’t give a toss if everyone hated Borderlands and the cinema cash registers were ringing. Indeed this was the angle of attack chosen by Uwe Boll, who’s presided over many terrible videogame movies but reckons this one is so bad everyone’s now wishing he directed it. And now it looks like the writing’s on the wall.
Borderlands will arrive on unspecified home streaming services on August 30, per the Hollywood Handle, 21 days after its August 9 premiere. Note that this doesn’t mean it’ll be free on Netflix, but is more likely to be available for rent or purchase on the likes of Prime Video (the distributor is Lionsgate, which has films available across various platforms).
The move indicates that Borderlands’ various backers have given up on any significant returns from its cinema run, remarkably quickly, and are now looking to squeeze as much as they can out of it, Morbius-style, while people still might be interested in hate-watching the thing. The likelihood is that this is going to go down as a massive flop regardless, with a potential loss north of $100 million, and it’s certainly going to have people looking at the viability of Borderlands as a wider franchise outside of the fourth mainline game in the series.
The only chink of light I can see anywhere for Borderlands is that the audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are very slightly better than those of the critics, averaging out at 53%. Whether that translates into any significant groundswell of support when it’s on wider release seems doubtful, but stranger things have happened. As for Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford, he’s simply adopted the classic internet tactic of posting through the whole thing, somehow spinning the terrible reception to pretend he’s “super flattered” about it all.
