Back in 2020, Lionsgate announced its intentions to finally get a movie adaptation of Gearbox’s RPG-shooter franchise Borderlands off the ground. After a flurry of casting news that ranged from the strange to the surprisingly fitting, we’ve not heard a thing about it, even as some of its stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Hart have had time in the press for other films. The film is still being made, and directed by Hostel’s Eli Roth.
But as far as reshoots are concerned, Roth’s not handling those duties. According to Deadline, outlets that recently reported that Roth was fired are overstating things: Terminator: Dark Fate director Tim Miller is stepping to handle the two weeks’ worth of additional shooting. At the moment, Roth is busy directing the horror movie Thanksgiving, based off a fake movie trailer from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s 2007 film Grindhouse. Shooting for that film begins in March, and Lionsgate (with Roth’s approval) opted to bring in Miller for the finish line.
As previously stated, Lionsgate has been trying its hardest to get a Borderlands movie into existence. The studio first announced a film adaptation in 2015, with Roth eventually signed on to direct and write the screenplay with eventual The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin. In the time it’s taken for the movie to come out, the franchise has gradually made something of a comeback. Borderlands 3 released in 2019 (seven years after the retail launch of Borderlands 2). In 2022, Gearbox released Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, a Dungeons & Dragons-themed spinoff of the mainline games that sold like gangbusters; and New Tales from the Borderlands, Gearbox’s follow up to the 2014 choice-driven interactive adventure game from the now defunct Telltale games.
If and when that Borderlands movie comes out, it’ll be interesting to see what kind of position the franchise is in by that point, and what comes out of the series in the aftermath of the film’s release.
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