Eli Roth Blames ‘Borderlands’ Disaster on COVID

The rise of video game adaptations is very much upon us, and with that, hits such as “Sonic the Hedgehog,” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” and “Minecraft”.

Then there’s Eli Roth’s “Borderlands”. Roth’s box-office bomb cost 145M to produce and ended up finishing its run with a total of just $31M worldwide in box-office receipts. The film was reportedly a $115 million loss for Lionsgate.

The reviews were nasty — it scored a 10% on Rotten Tomatoes — but anyone who followed the pre-release drama saw this coming. The film started production in 2021, using a screenplay Roth had co-written with Craig Mazin (“The Last of Us”), but then underwent extensive reshoots with “Deadpool” helmer Tim Miller taking over for Roth as director.

Appearing on The Town podcast, Roth was asked about “Borderlands.” Initially reluctant, Roth decided to finally answer a few questions about his infamous film. He says the released version was not his own, and that he didn’t recognize the finished product.

I remember [asking myself], am I at the point of my career where I’m going to sit down to watch my own movie that says I wrote and directed it, and I really genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen?

As he continued, Roth claimed now being in a place where he accepts what happened to his ill-fated film. However, he believes that what truly turned “Borderlands” into the disastrous, and much-mocked, bomb that it is today was the fact that he had to conduct pre-production on Zoom, rather than in-person, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“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. You can’t prep a movie on that scale over Zoom.

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.

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.

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.