Director Admits ‘We Got Our Asses Handed to Us’ After His Movie Flopped at Box Office

Plenty went wrong with the summer 2024 blockbuster adaptation of Borderlands.

Eli Roth, the film’s director, appeared on The Town podcast last Wednesday where he said the production team “got our asses handed to us a bit” after the film was one of the year’s biggest critical and commercial flops.

Borderlands, which starred Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Gina Gershon and Jamie Lee Curtis, is an adaptation of the popular sci-fi video game series from Gearbox Entertainment. It revolves around bounty hunters who travel to the desolate wasteland planet Pandora in search of alien technology, and find themselves caught up in all sorts of weird, wacky, and delightfully violent situations.

Unfortunately, the movie made $33 million on a $120 million budget, and scored a paltry 10% on Rotten Tomatoes. Film critics and gamers alike decried it as one of the worst video game adaptations ever.

“I think none of us anticipated how complicated things were gonna be with COVID,” Roth said. “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.”

In addition, Roth was filming his passion project (and critical success) slasher Thanksgiving for a majority of the post-production and subsequent reshoots on Borderlands—reshoots so extensive, Roth didn’t even know what the movie would be about when he saw it.

“That was an experience. Never happened before,” he said. “I remember [thinking,] ‘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 genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen?’”

Roth’s next movie will be a sequel to Thanksgiving.