‘Borderlands' Writer Joe Crombie Might Not Even Exist

A reader pointed something out that I never got to the bottom of. Who is “Borderlands” co-writer Joe Crombie? I reached out to a few sources and all of them told me it was a pseudonym.

As you all know, “Borderlands” bombed hard at the box-office, and with critics — it stands to lose over $100M. Back in 2021, the video game adaptation went into production using a screenplay Eli Roth had co-written with Craig Mazin (“The Last of Us”).

Reshoots for “Borderlands” occurred in early Summer 2022. The movie was test-screened in November of that year and that led to Lionsgate calling for more work to be done on the film. Last year, Roth was replaced by Tim Miller (“Deadpool”) for additional reshoots on the film.

Many months ago, I reported that Mazin had officially removed his name from the project, replaced by one Joe Crombie. There was much speculation that Mazin had used Crombie as a pseudonym to distance himself from the film. However, Mazin has repeatedly denied these rumors.

“I am not a credited writer on the film, so I cannot claim any kind of authorship of Borderlands, much less ‘co-writing,'” Mazin told Variety. “I did see the report about the pseudonym, which is false. I did not use a pseudonym. If the name in question is indeed a pseudonym, all I can say is… it’s not mine.”

So, who is Joe Crombie? It turns out, absolutely nobody fucking knows. Many “Borderlands” reviews, all of them bad, have namechecked Crombie in their writeups, criticizing his screenplay, but what if he doesn’t even exist? At least The AV Club acknowledged the elephant in the room by mentioning in their review that the film was “written by Roth and a mysterious stranger named “Joe Crombie.”

Deadline’s Pete Hammond went one step further in his review by blatantly indicating that Crombie was Mazin himself:

[The film] has a near decade-long history of failed attempts to crack its code, including Craig Mazin, who now shares a co-writing credit using “Joe Crombie” (who has only this one listed credit on IMDb and, according to IMDb, is Mazin’s pseudonym).

Other writers who were hired to do rewrites on “Borderlands” include Gary Ross, Aaron Berg, Oren Uziel, Juel Taylor, Tony Rettenmaier, Zak Olkewicz, Chris Bremner and … Sam Levinson! “Joe Crombie” could be any of them, but my money is still on Mazin.