Eli Roth may be primarily known as a horror filmmaker, but at heart he’s a video store bred cinephile who’s down to take a crack at movies that don’t, for example, feature a cat lapping up blood from the neck of a headless body. In 2018, he made the family-friendly fantasy film “The House with a Clock in Its Walls” starring Cate Blanchett and Jack Black, and that production evidently went smoothly enough for those two stars to team up with Roth again in 2021 for the big-budget movie adaptation of the popular video game “Borderlands.” This was Roth’s big chance to prove he could deliver a four-quadrant blockbuster, and, well, just about nothing went as planned.
Advertisement
It’s never a good sign when a film arrives in theaters four years after it commenced principal photography, and it’s never helpful when that release is preceded by months of reports detailing everything that went wrong with the production. Many fans of the “Borderlands” video games were already upset that their wanton violence had been toned down so that the movie adaptation, which carried a budget of somewhere between $110 million and $120 million, could appeal to kids. The big problem, however, was that Roth was unavailable for reshoots in 2023 because he was making “Thanksgiving,” which led to Lionsgate hiring “Deadpool” director Tim Miller to finish the film (with rewrites from somewhere around seven writers). The movie also drew negative press when screenwriter Craig Mazin asked to have his name removed from the credits. (There was speculation that Mazin opted for the pseudonym “Joe Crombie,” but he denies this.)
Advertisement
Lionsgate eventually released the film on August 9, 2024, with “Borderlands” drawing viciously negative reviews and moviegoer indifference. It wound up grossing an anemic $33 million worldwide, which left the studio taking a pretty significant hit. How could a movie with such a phenomenal cast (which also included Kevin Hart, Edgar Ramirez, and Jamie Lee Curtis) go so wrong? Many months later, Roth’s finally ready to talk about it.
The Covid pandemic proved an insurmountable obstacle for Roth and Borderlands
During an appearance on Matthew Belloni’s “The Town” podcast, Roth revealed that the Covid-19 restrictions of 2021 (the film began shooting in April of that year) hampered him every step of the way. As he told Belloni:
Advertisement
“I think none of us anticipated how complicated things were going to be with Covid — not just in terms of what we’re shooting. But then you have to do pickup shots or reshoots, and you have six people that are all on different sets, and those sets are getting shut down because the cities have opened up and now there’s a Covid outbreak, and … 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, and you can’t prep a movie of that scale over Zoom. I think we all thought we could pull it off, and we kind of got our asses handed to us a bit.”
Obviously, some filmmakers were able to make good movies under these unprecedented restrictions, but, even though Roth is a veteran director, this was his first time overseeing a massive production with so many moving pieces. To his credit, even though he didn’t finish “Borderlands,” he did press for it. “You took the money, take it on the chin,” he told Belloni. “I believe that once they pay you, that’s part of the deal, [whether] there’s creative differences or whatever happens.”
Advertisement
Roth added that he would work with Lionsgate again under more reasonable circumstances. A cynic might say that since Roth is currently in the process of launching his new horror production company, The Horror Section (a name that harkens back to those video store roots), it behooves him to make sure all of his studio bridges remain un-scorched, but this is how he’s always played the Hollywood game. It’s not every director who can laugh off a fairly catastrophic flop, but Roth is gamely owning his failure, and Hollywood notices stuff like this. It helps that “Thanksgiving,” the slasher he directed amid the debacle of “Borderlands,” turned out to be one of his best films to date.
