Borderlands

Borderlands is what happens when a studio spends $115 million trying to turn a beloved M-rated video game into a PG-13 Guardians of the Galaxy knockoff. The result is a film so creatively bankrupt that it debuted at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, earned a D+ CinemaScore from opening-weekend audiences, grossed $33 million against a $115 million production budget (plus $30 million in marketing), and lost Lionsgate an estimated $80 million. It is, by every measurable standard, one of the worst major studio releases of 2024.

The premise borrows loosely from the games. Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a bounty hunter, is hired by Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), a corporate villain, to retrieve his kidnapped daughter Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) from the lawless planet Pandora. Once there, Lilith discovers that Atlas wants Tina for her ability to open an ancient alien vault. Lilith teams up with Roland (Kevin Hart), Krieg (Florian Munteanu), her foster mother Dr. Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), and the robot Claptrap (Jack Black) to protect Tina and reach the vault first.

If this sounds like every sci-fi action movie you've seen since 2014, that's because it is. The plot is a fetch quest interrupted by bus rides, convenient discoveries, and characters literally stumbling over plot devices. Lilith 'gets a feeling' about where to go. Things are found exactly when they need to be found. The vault key appears in an underground maze that the team navigates with minimal actual difficulty. Every narrative beat arrives on schedule with zero tension or surprise.

The ensemble, despite costing what must have been a significant portion of the budget in salary alone, generates approximately zero chemistry. Blanchett sleepwalks through a role that requires her to be a battle-hardened badass on a planet she abandoned as a child. She's a fine actress doing nothing with nothing. Hart's Roland is so marginal to the story that multiple reviewers reported forgetting he was in the film. The character who was a stoic military leader in the games becomes a background player who occasionally shoots things. Curtis collects a paycheck as the eccentric scientist foster mom. Jack Black voices Claptrap with the energy of someone recording dialogue during a lunch break.

The only cast member who seems calibrated to the material is Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina, who brings actual manic energy to a role that demands it. Everyone else is either miscast, underwritten, or both.

The PG-13 rating is the film's original sin. Borderlands the video game franchise is defined by over-the-top violence, crude humor, dark comedy, and anarchic energy. The games are rated M for Mature. They feature exploding heads, rivers of blood, psychopaths screaming about meat, and humor that ranges from juvenile to genuinely transgressive. Stripping all of that away to chase a broader audience is like adapting Deadpool without the R rating. Oh wait, they did that too, and it also didn't work until they brought the R rating back.

Stunt coordinator Jimmy O'Dee confirmed that scenes with heads being blown up and feet being cut off were filmed and then cut to maintain PG-13. Eli Roth, a director whose entire career is built on graphic horror violence, was hired to make a sanitized family-friendly action comedy. The creative dissonance is staggering. Hiring Eli Roth and then telling him not to be Eli Roth is studio decision-making at its most self-defeating.

The production history tells the real story. Nine writers worked on the script across eight years. Craig Mazin wrote the original screenplay, then removed his name entirely. Tim Miller directed reshoots because Roth was busy with another movie. The studio reportedly hated Roth's original cut. The result is a film directed by two different people, written by nine different people, and produced by a committee that couldn't agree on what kind of movie they were making. It plays exactly like what it is: a corporate product assembled from spare parts by people who had conflicting visions and ultimately agreed on nothing.

The film's ideological content is secondary to its incompetence, but it's there. Lilith is structured as a Mary Sue. She has a tragic past, supernatural powers she doesn't know about, and the entire plot resolves when she accepts how special she truly is. The 'Firehawk' reveal at the climax is a chosen-one coronation that earns nothing because the film never builds toward it with any dramatic weight. The female-dominated ensemble relegates every male character to villain (Atlas), sidekick (Claptrap, Roland), or near-mute muscle (Krieg). This isn't an inherently woke choice. Plenty of great films center women. But when the male characters are systematically stripped of competence, agency, and screen time to ensure the female lead shines, it starts to look less like storytelling and more like quota-filling.

Kevin Hart's Roland is the most glaring example. In the games, Roland is the leader. He's a commanding military presence. He dies heroically in Borderlands 2 in a moment that devastated the fan community. In the movie, he's a short comedian doing a 'serious' turn that the film doesn't know how to use, so it mostly doesn't. Hart trained with Navy SEALs to prepare for a role that the script forgot to write.

The box office tells the definitive story. $8.6 million opening weekend. $33 million total worldwide. Against a combined production and marketing budget north of $145 million. Lionsgate lost an estimated $80 million. The film was pulled to digital just three weeks after theatrical release, an unprecedented speed that tells you exactly how fast the studio wanted to stop the bleeding.

Borderlands joins a long list of video game adaptations that failed because the people making them didn't understand or didn't care about what made the source material work. The Borderlands games are anarchic, violent, funny, and self-aware. The movie is sterile, safe, unfunny, and oblivious. It took everything distinctive about the franchise, sanded it down to nothing, and served the remainder in a Guardians of the Galaxy costume that doesn't fit.

10% on Rotten Tomatoes. 48% audience score. D+ CinemaScore. $80 million in losses. A stacked cast of Oscar winners and box office draws couldn't save it. Borderlands isn't just a bad video game movie. It's a case study in how not to adapt anything.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Girlboss Protagonist / Mary Sue	4	1	1.8	7.2
Systematic Male Marginalization	3	1.4	1	4.2
Source Material Character Alteration (Roland)	3	1.4	0.5	2.1
Sanitization of Source Material	3	1	1	3
Corporate Villain as Sole Male Authority	2	1	0.5	1
TOTAL WOKE				17.5

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Found Family / Chosen Bonds	3	0.7	1.8	3.78
Maternal Protection and Sacrifice	3	0.7	1	2.1
Anti-Corporate / Individual vs. Institution	2	0.7	1	1.4
Self-Reliance and Competence	2	0.7	0.5	0.7
Rejection of Authoritarian Control	1	0.7	0.5	0.28
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				8.3

Score Margin: -9 WOKE