LogIn"We got our asses handed to us a bit."
Lionsgate
More than half a year has passed since the release of the Borderlands movie on August 9 last year, which suffered a painful flop. It earned $8.8 million in the US during its debut weekend, merely 6% of the overall cost, and received a poor Metascore of 26, being called a "visually repulsive dud" by film critics.
Well, for entertainment products whose audiences might be broad and, therefore, have different tastes, sometimes the opinions could vary as well. The reasons why it wasn't either commercially or critically successful could be obvious to you, like a chaotic plot, awful jokes, underdeveloped characters, or failure to connect with fans of the video game series. However, none of these were true, according to the movie's director, Eli Roth.
He believes that COVID-19 and Zoom, the software for online meetings, are to blame, rather than these content-related issues. Speaking on the The Town podcast, Roth recalled the limitations brought by the global pandemic.
"I think none of us, none of us anticipated how complicated things were gonna be with COVID. Not just in terms of what we're shooting, but then you have to do pick-up shots or reshoots and you have six people that are all on different sets and every one of those sets is getting shut down because the cities have opened up, and now there's a COVID outbreak and it was just like… 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." (Thanks, PC Gamer)
The difficulties and complexity of coordinating have become roadblocks. "You can't prep a movie on that scale over Zoom," Roth concluded, "I think we all thought we could pull it off and we got our asses handed to us a bit."
But that's not the end for the franchise. This year, fans have something to look forward to: Borderlands 4, the developer's "most ambitious title to date," is set to launch on September 23. You can learn more and wishlist it on Steam.
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