Filming wrapped on director Eli Roth‘s adaptation of the Borderlands video game series from Gearbox and 2K way back in June of 2021. A year and a half later, Deadpool director Tim Miller had to step in to handle the project’s two weeks of reshoots because Roth had the chance to finally – after sixteen years – make a feature based on the Thanksgiving faux trailer he put together for the Quentin Tarantino / Robert Rodriguez collaboration Grindhouse. The Borderlands reshoots have been completed, Thanksgiving has come and gone, and Lionsgate is now gearing up to finally release Borderlands into the world on August 9th… and with that date right around the corner, a featurette has arrived online to give us a look at the “dysfunctional family” of characters at the heart of the story. You can watch it in the embed above.
The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin wrote the initial screenplay for Borderlands, but removed his name from the project after the script was rewritten by Roth, Juel Taylor, Tony Rettenmaier, Joe Crombie, Chris Bremner, and Sam Levinson. Zak Olkewicz wrote scenes for Miller during the reshoots. Elements from drafts Aaron Berg and Oren Uziel wrote before Mazin have reportedly made their way into the film as well. So there were a lot of cooks in the kitchen on this one.
The film stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Edgar Ramirez, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Haley Bennett, Olivier Richters, Gina Gershon, Cheyenne Jackson, Charles Babalola, Benjamin Byron Davis, Steven Boyer, Bobby Lee, Ryann Redmond, Penn Jillette, and Janina Gavankar, who plays “a new, key character” called Commander Knoxx, someone who has not been in the video games. Jack Black provides the voice of the robot Claptrap. Here’s the synopsis: Lilith (Blanchett), an infamous outlaw with a mysterious past, reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora to find the missing daughter of the universe’s most powerful S.O.B., Atlas (Ramirez). Lilith forms an alliance with an unexpected team – Roland (Hart), a former elite mercenary, now desperate for redemption; Tiny Tina (Greenblatt), a feral pre-teen demolitionist; Krieg (Munteanu), Tina’s musclebound, rhetorically challenged protector; Tannis (Curtis), the scientist with a tenuous grip on sanity; and Claptrap (Black), a persistently wiseass robot. These unlikely heroes must battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power. The fate of the universe could be in their hands – but they’ll be fighting for something more: each other.
Borderlands is produced by Arad Productions’ Avi Arad and Ari Arad, along with PICTURESTART’s Erik Feig. Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford serves as executive producer with Strauss Zelnick of Take-Two Interactive. James Myers and Aaron Edmonds are overseeing the project for Lionsgate, while Emmy Yu does the same for Arad Productions and Lucy Kitada and Royce Reeves-Darby are overseeing for PICTURESTART.
I know nothing about the video games, but the Borderlands movie looks like fun to me. I’ll definitely be checking it out at some point.
Are you looking forward to Borderlands? Take a look at the featurette, then let us know by leaving a comment below.