A wreck of a film with 10% on Rotten Tomatoes that somehow stars 2 Oscar winners is releasing on digital 3 weeks after bombing at the box office

Every year has its fair share of cinematic faceplants, but there seems to be an especially distinct stench coming off of 2024’s pile of rubbish. Madame Web was the MCU’s worst sin yet, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire made joyless schlock out of a beloved IP, Sony used Tarot to send some first-time filmmakers up the creek with no paddle, and the existence of Rebel Moon is embarrassing for all parties involved (perhaps for Zack Snyder himself, most of all).

But very few of these films have wound up paying the price for their sins; with the exception of Rebel Moon, which made its first and only home on Netflix, none of 2024’s most grotesquely awful movies have been shouldered with the embarrassment of a swift shuffling to VOD after flopping at the box office.

Borderlands, however, was not so lucky.

Its single-digit critic score debut didn’t get much better (at present, the film has a 10% critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes), and while $24.2 million isn’t a terrible box office haul on its own, those are very poor numbers when your film cost roughly to $120 million to make.

Suffice to say there’s no digging oneself out of this hole, and so Lionsgate has gone ahead and pulled the plug on this particular enterprise, and Borderlands will now be available on digital this Friday.

Now, it’s one thing to be a bad movie, but Borderlands is strange on a level that transcends its peers pretty significantly. For one, the fact that they secured Cate Blanchett — a cinematic luminary in every sense of the word, is baffling just on its own — but the fact that they cast her in the leading role of Lilith (who, in the games, is a very young adult) despite being 55 years old only compounds this curiosity even more.

The same could be said about Jamie Lee Curtis, who also shores up Borderlands‘ main cast as Tannis (who, again, is a very young adult in the games), though at least Curtis’ well-documented affinity for gonzo, cool-mom genre work can explain her presence a bit more easily. Still, to have two Academy Award winners in a film like this is very peculiar indeed.

But more importantly, Borderlands‘ decrepit attempt at storytelling overshadows the fact that, as a piece of metafiction, its bones are actually quite strong; far stronger than they have any right to be. There’s no telling, of course, how intentional such an angle actually was behind the scenes, but considering that Borderlands also ends up dropping that ball over the course of its runtime, it doesn’t really matter either way.

Borderlands is still playing in cinemas for the time being, but at this rate, you’re better off just waiting for its VOD release on Aug. 30.