COVID-19 Became a Fatal Factor: Director Explains Failure of Borderlands Film Adaptation

The Borderlands film adaptation, which was released last summer and failed to recoup even a third of its $115 million budget (the film earned only $33 million). In a recent episode of The Town podcast, the film’s director Eli Roth shared his views on the reasons for the failure and explained the role the coronavirus pandemic played in this.

According to him, work on the project occurred at the peak of restrictions, which greatly complicated the filming process. The film crew faced a lot of logistical and technical difficulties: most of the work processes had to be organized remotely, via video communication. This concerned not only the production itself, but also preparation – from coordinating the stunt team to visualizations and scene planning.

Roth noted that the pandemic disrupted schedules and forced the team to adapt to constantly changing conditions. Reshoots took place on different sites, which were constantly closed due to new outbreaks of COVID-19. As a result, the project had people working on it scattered across different locations, making normal interaction and proper preparation impossible, especially when working on a big-budget film.

An additional surprise was that the final editing of Borderlands was done by Tim Miller, the director of Deadpool. As a result, Roth himself found himself in a situation where he did not know what kind of result would be shown to viewers, despite the fact that the film was formally listed as having been shot and written by him.

Thus, Borderlands became another victim of the pandemic, which radically changed not only the rules of the filming process, but also affected the final look of the film, which turned out to be far from the original idea.