‘Borderlands’ (2024) was a flop at the box office. The CEO and CFO of Lionsgate admitted that Robert Rodriguez’s adaptation of the popular video game series was a complete disaster for them. They cited Borderlands as one of the games that lost the most money.
Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer said, “Within our television Group, our unscripted business is feeling the effects of a continuing market correction. In our film group, the poor box office performance of Borderlands, coupled with softer-than-anticipated results for other releases in the quarter, reflected an environment with less margin for error than ever before.”
He’d later explain that “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. Several of our other releases in the quarter, though cushioned by financial models that worked as intended, didn’t live up to either our standards or our projections.”
‘Borderlands’ ended its one-month run at the box office with $31 million before moving to digital platforms. It turned out that, with a production budget of $115 million and a $30 million marketing campaign, it likely lost over $114 million.
Directed by Eli Roth, ‘Borderlands’ is based on the popular video game series of the same name. The movie follows a group of misfits who come together to find the daughter of the most powerful man in the universe. It features a cast including Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Ariana Greenblatt, Edgar Ramirez, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon, and Jamie Lee Curtis.
Early reviews from critics are overwhelmingly negative, and ‘Borderlands’ currently holds a score of 6% on Rotten Tomatoes. This means almost all critics gave the film a negative review so far, and it doesn’t bode well for its reception among wider audiences.