Borderlands Movie Flops at the Opening Weekend Box Office

The first weekend after a movie’s release should be one with the audience rushing over to cinemas, sitting in front of the big screen with fresh-out popcorn to enjoy a relaxing time of a visual feast. And this doesn’t seem to be the situation for the Borderlands movie, Lionsgate’s video game adaptation which debuted last Friday. 

A month before the release, industry insider Daniel Richtman predicted the movie would be among 2024's most horrible movies. If his words were not that powerful as they only stood for his personal opinions, the fresh reviews as soon as the movie was out called it "cliché" "unfunny," and a "visually repulsive dud." A weekend has passed, and things didn’t make a U-turn. According to Variety, Borderlands earned $8.8 million at the box office from 3,125 theaters in the United States. Even with the $7.7 million box office from overseas, the total makes a mere sum of $16.5 million. 

We need to do some math calculations here. The production budget of Borderlands is said to be $115 million, plus the $30 million for marketing and distribution, which made a total of 145 million. So, the weekend box office recovers roughly 6% of the overall cost. Even though the global presales are said to have covered 60% of the production costs, this not-good-looking score tells the reason why Variety’s source from the studio said it is “a disastrous result” and “one that was far behind already low pre-release expectations.”

It’s true that we have seen quite a few successful adaptations of video games — Fallout, The Last of Us, and Super Mario Bros. are some of them. And it’s hard to ignore the hot trend of adapting video games into movies or comics. However, being trendy could be a double-edged sword sometimes. While it boasts a solid foundation of fans to be target audiences, who would probably save some marketing budget for movie producers, the expectation from the die-hard fans for the adaptation to meet could be at a higher level as well. 

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