'Borderlands' Director Eli Roth Blames COVID And Zoom Calls And Claims Film Was Reshot Without Him
Eli Roth, the director of the Borderlands adaptation, which bombed at the box office, recently blamed COVID and Zoom calls for its failures.
Speaking with Matthew Belloni on The Town podcast, Roth first claimed that he did not work on the film’s reshoots, “I did not. That is correct. And it’s the kind of situation where, look, I’m friends with everyone there. And any time you have to sort of talk about what happens, someone’s going to look back and usually and it’s just the director.”
He later remarked that when he saw the film he thought, “Wow, this is the first time I’m going to see a movie, sort of being like, ‘Okay, I directed this, what happens?’ That was kind of interesting story. Never happened before. And I remember being, ‘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 genuinely don’t know what’s going to happen.’”
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Later in the interview he put the blame for the film’s failure on COVID and Zoom talks. He said, “None of us anticipated 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…
“And 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, and I think we all thought we could pull it off, and we kinda got our asses handed to us a bit,” he concluded.
Borderlands grossed just $15.4 million at the domestic box office and added another $17.4 million internationally for a global gross of just $32.9 million. Box office analyst OMB Reviews noted the film needed to gross around $300 million to break even and it likely lost around $144 million.
The film has an atrocious 4.7 out of 10 on IMDb from 47,000 reviews.
Back in November 2024 following the film’s box office failure, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick admitted the film’s returns were “disappointing.”
He told IGN, “Obviously that movie was disappointing. That said, it actually sold more catalog. So, I don’t think it hurt at all, if anything I think it may have helped a little bit. It does highlight something that I’ve spoken about many times which is the difficulty of bringing our intellectual property to another medium.”
What do you make of Roth’s comments?
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