‘Borderlands’ Director Breaks Silence on Movie Bombing at Box Office – ryan

• Eli Roth said he and the other filmmakers behind his Borderlands adaptation “got our asses handed to us a bit” when the movie bombed at the box office in August 2024
• “I think none of us anticipated how complicated things were gonna be with COVID,” Roth said on The Town podcast; he also confirmed he did not participate in Borderlands reshoots while he worked on his 2023 movie Thanksgiving
• Borderlands costarred Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ariana Greenblatt and Jack Black

Eli Roth is opening up about what went wrong with his Borderlands movie.

Roth, 52, appeared on the Wednesday, April 9 episode of The Town podcast with host Matthew Belloni to discuss his newly formed production company The Horror Section; during the episode, the filmmaker and actor admitted that a myriad of issues resulted in his adaptation of the Borderlands video games bombing at the box office.

Borderlands starred Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Ariana GreenblattJamie Lee Curtis and Jack Black as a group of space-faring adventurers; Roth cited the aftereffects of the COVID-19 pandemic as a consistent strain on the production while also confirming he was not even present for several reshoots the movie took on while he made his 2023 slasher film Thanksgiving instead.

“I think none of us anticipated how complicated things were gonna be with COVID,” Roth said during the podcast, citing COVID outbreaks that occurred while filming the large-scale production. “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, and I think we all thought we could pull it off and we got our asses handed to us a bit.”

Roth said elsewhere during the interview that his work on passion project Thanksgiving prevented him from participating in Borderlands reshoots to the point that he did not know what happened in Borderlands when he saw the movie.

“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?’ ”

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While Roth is now pivoting away from working with major studios with his new independent production company, the actor-director said he accepted changes made to Borderlands without much trouble. “There is a thing where they’re like you know what, you took the money, you can take it on the chin,” he said. “I believe that, once (the studio) pays you, that’s part of the deal. If there’s creative differences or they’re doing reshoots without you, and say, ‘This is what we’re doing’ and you’re the figurehead, you get out there, you put on a smile and people just smack you in the face.”

“You gotta stand there and go, ‘Okay.’ How do you justify it? You don’t,” he added of the route the production took. “But I also thought ‘This isn’t really me and this isn’t what I want to do moving forward, so let me get back to my roots.’ ”

Roth does not yet have a new movie in development to follow Borderlands; in December 2023, he announced plans to make a sequel to Thanksgivingthough the movie does not appear to have been filmed yet.