Borderlands Behind The Scenes Drama Is More Exciting Than The Movie
By now, it’s become widespread knowledge that Borderlands is a box office bomb, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since John Carter. Yet, for all of the stilted dialogue and strange story decisions, the film was doomed to fail even before the cameras started rolling. After all, when a film is credited as being written by someone who doesn’t exist, that isn’t going to fill anyone with confidence.
Buckle up because the production of Borderlands is going to be studied by cinephiles for decades.
In Production Hell For Years
Borderlands was originally announced in August 2015, a few years after the video game Borderlands 2 turned into a megahit (not sure why I have to preface the video game of that name, as there will never, ever be a sequel to this movie), and the first script was created with an R-rating. Oren Uziel (a writer and producer who’s had a lot of success, including with Sonic the Hedgehog) took over in 2018, which is two writers before a director was attached, but that’s not unheard of in Hollywood.
It took five years for Eli Roth to sign on as the director, and he had a script from The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin (the third writer) to work from, but that’s when everything fell apart.
The Writer That Doesn’t Exist
A year later, Craig Mazin was no longer attached to Borderlands, and two more writers reworked the script alongside Eli Roth to the extent that Mazin was left off the credits, as his screenplay wasn’t the one that made it to theaters. There was rumor and innuendo that “Joe Crombie” was Mazin using a pseudonym, but he’s denied these reports multiple times, so then, who’s the top-billed writer for the movie?
The truth is that, for now, no one knows, as no one is admitting to using a fake name. Typically, in Hollywood, pseudonyms are used when someone doesn’t want to be associated with a project, and given Borderlands is approaching the Mars Needs Moms level of box office disaster, it makes sense why someone would hide their involvement. Traditionally, directors will use “Alan Smithee” to avoid being (dis)credited, which both David Lynch and Paul Verhoeven did to hide involvement from the television cuts of Dune and Showgirls, respectively.
Reshoots
So, while blame for the script is up in the air, Eli Roth is taking most of the heat for the disaster, but again, there’s more to his involvement. Borderlands had two weeks of reshoots in January 2023, which Roth could not oversee due to working on his slasher, Thanksgiving, so Tim Miller, director of Deadpool and an executive producer on the film, stepped in and handled the reshoots.
To what extent the scenes had to be re-done is unknown, but it was bad enough that weeks before the original release, the film was pulled from the schedule and delayed one year to August 2024.
Completed For Years
That’s not great, but it wouldn’t be so bad except for one thing, and that’s by the time the re-shoots were called for by the studio; Borderlands had already been done with shooting for almost two years. It sounds crazy, but this movie was filmed in 2021, and so everything that happened behind the scenes went down after it was filmed. Not even Marvel, famous for needing reshoots and starting production without a finalized script, has had a disaster this historically horrible.
Disasters Like This Shouldn’t Happen
The delay of Kraven the Hunter by a full year was caused by the actor’s strike to ensure that it could be promoted; since then, the film has not undergone any reshoots or last-minute changes that we know of. That’s the closest I could find to the Borderlands situation within the last decade, and I’m certain that more information will come out later about the behind-the-scenes creative process. Until then, movie fans are left wondering how this movie was ever allowed to be released.
