‘Nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong’: Lionsgate CEO opens up about that awful ‘Borderlands’ movie

There are very few movies that have been worse received than Borderlands, and that’s for good reason. The film is absolutely terrible and has little to nothing to offer both longtime fans of the franchise and complete newcomers.

Released back in August, Borderlands had a tragic box office run only managing to earn $33 million globally which wasn’t close to making back its exorbitant budget, and this was despite stacking the cast with some of the biggest actors still working today.

No really, Borderlands had Kevin Hart, Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Jack Black, but still wasn’t able to make back its budget. Now months after the disaster, the CEO of Lionsgate Jon Feltheimer has opened up about the failure claiming that everything possible went wrong.

“On Borderlands, nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong: it sat on the shelf for too long during the pandemic, and reshoots and rising interest rates took it outside the safety zone of our usual strict financial models,” the Lionsgate boss said on an earnings call cited by Deadline.

He’s not wrong, Borderlands cost around $120 million to make which is far from what it earned at the box office. We can’t imagine it has performed much better digitally either. To his defense, Fletheimer noted that “the success of financial models doesn’t take the place of also getting the creative right,” so it would appear they know where the problems in the movie lie.

Borderlands’ biggest issue is that it’s a movie based on a video game but almost never references the source material or honors its universe. In fact, if these characters didn’t look like the ones fans recognize this could have been passed off as just your standard action flick. Still, having these characters didn’t help much.

The movie has a terrible 10 percent critic review score on Rotten Tomatoes partnered with a bad, but slightly better, 51 percent audience rating. Perhaps because of how bad it is this movie will turn opinion around in the coming years as fans lot it in as one of those “so bad it’s good” films, but on first watch, we’d argue it doesn’t even come close to falling in that category. It’s just bad. The good news is that if you want to see what all the hate is for then you can do so easily as Borderlands is now streaming on Prime Video. If you don’t have access to the Amazon subscription service but still want to check it out, it’s available through all of the usual VOD services, just at a small price.