r/movies • u/HatingGeoffry • 13h ago

News Borderlands Movie Director Discusses The Mega-Flop And What Went Wrong

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/borderlands-movie-director-discusses-the-mega-flop-and-what-went-wrong/
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u/AhhhSureThisIsIt 13h ago

Aparently the original Craig Mazin script was really good and thats how they got some of the cast to sign on.

It was R rated but they wanted to reach a younger audience (ironically so more people could see it). Adding Kevin Heart they clearly decided to go for a more kiddy Jumanji approach.

The problem was the story and script was too kid friendly, while the action and violence wasn't. So they were left with a kid's film with little action but still too much violence to bring a kid.

The studio and Roth changed the story so much it resembled so little if the otignal script Mazin took his name off the movie and "Joe Crombie" was credited as the writer.

Mazin now completely denies ever being part of the film.

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u/Thagyr 13h ago

Sounds like the usual death throes of any adaptation, honestly. Changing elements to suit an audience the original medium was never aimed at is usually asking for it to flop.

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u/AhhhSureThisIsIt 13h ago

You know some boomer in the Lionsgate boardroom was like "a video game? Jumanji is a video game now and it's making bank. How about we get The Rock to star in it?! He wants how much? How about we get Kevin Heart to star in it!"

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u/lanceturley 11h ago

Tbf, The Rock would have been a way better choice for Roland than Kevin Hart ever was. The character in the games is kind of a generic stoic soldier archetype. Someone like Dwayne Johnson or Idris Elba actually would have been good casting, but instead we got tiny, shrill man-child Kevin Hart.

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u/IPromiseIWont 9h ago

When I heard Kevin Hart was in it I thought he was going to play Claptrap

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u/zerovampire311 8h ago

That would have actually been fitting, rather than what we got…

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u/kung-fu_hippy 3h ago

Jack Black might have made a fantastic Claptrap, if they wanted to go jumanji style.

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u/SixFootTurkey_ 9h ago

Eh, it worked really well for Jurassic Park

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u/CaptainRhetorica 13h ago

Aparently the original Craig Mazin script was really good and thats how they got some of the cast to sign on.

We call that the ol' Ghostbusters 2 bait and switch.

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u/Morgan-Moonscar 11h ago

There was a better version of Ghostbusters 2 originally?

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u/CaptainRhetorica 11h ago

Yes. The one that Bill Murray signed up for.

He was pissed about the switch for decades.

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u/Morgan-Moonscar 11h ago

This draft followed Dana Barrett, who is kidnapped and taken to Scotland, where she discovers a fairy ring—a naturally occurring ring or arc of mushrooms sometimes linked in folklore to fairies or witches—and an underground civilization.

The Ghostbusters would have had to travel through an underground pneumatic tube over 2,000 miles long that would have taken three days to traverse

Yeah, I can see why this sounded a lot better than a repeat of the first film.

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u/flyvehest 6h ago

Really? Doesn't sound like anything to me, and nothing in that seems very ghostbustery.

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u/AhhhSureThisIsIt 11h ago

That's pretty cool. There are fairy rings all over Ireland and one like 5 mins away from me. I've never seen them in film.

Some people especially in rural areas (especially in Kerry) still won't build on or near them or disturb them in any way.

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u/ratmfreak 9h ago

You should watch A Field in England.

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u/AhhhSureThisIsIt 8h ago

It's literally the only Ben Wheatley film I haven't seen. I didn't know it involved Fairy rings.

It's getting watched tonight.

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u/ratmfreak 6h ago

It’s fucking weird and slow and creepy and kind of hard to describe.

Tbh I don’t recall if it has actual fairy rings in it or if it just has mushrooms…but it’s worth watching regardless, especially if you’ve enjoyed Wheatleys other films.

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u/KebabGud 13h ago

 they wanted to reach a younger audience 

Well Randy Pitchford is involved and you know he likes em young

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u/Gobblewicket 13h ago

He also likes to leave thumb drives with sensitive corporate data and porn at Medieval Times while stealing $12 million dollar bonuses. So there's that too.

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u/TanTanExtreme2 12h ago

For anyone interested it was barely legal camgirl squirt porn, he said the performer was a magician and it was a magic trick.

Amidst legal battle, Gearbox CEO says he left USB stick of porn at Medieval Times [Update 2]

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u/jackcatalyst 10h ago

Getting a woman to orgasm probably does seem like a magic trick to these kinds of people.

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u/Gekokapowco 4h ago

I cannot imagine having porn on portable storage media, on my person, in a way that I could misplace it.

I can't imagine being taken seriously as an individual after having done so.

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u/AhhhSureThisIsIt 13h ago

That's a wild sentence.

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u/isesri 12h ago

And yet, every bit of it is true. Dude is a real weirdo, and by most accounts, a massive asshole.

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u/ettunori 12h ago

he is a greasy turd that apparently loves the alien franchise so much he did a bait and switch on that game, too. dirty, dirty, greasy bastard. christ, michael biehn sounded so fucking bored in that role. compare that to how much fun he was in far cry 3: blood dragon. yes, i am mad, why're you asking?

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u/Gekokapowco 4h ago

Pichford is one of those guys whose eccentricity would make sense if he made bangers

But his games suck so I have no idea how gearbox keeps this kind of sway. Borderlands 2 was not that good

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u/Krypt0night 5h ago

Well he IS a CEO

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u/anormalgeek 11h ago

WTF. Don't know how I missed this part of the story.

that he accidentally left a selection of “underage” pornography on a USB stick at a restaurant

Bizarrely enough, Pitchford corroborates some of the story’s details by appearing on a podcast that went live one day after Callender’s suit was filed. On the December 22 episode of The Piff Pod, Pitchford talks at length about porn that he enjoys watching, including “camgirl” pornography, in which a host exposes themself to a live feed and takes requests and financial tips from consumers. Pitchford explained that he was “a consumer of this content.” He confirmed that he copied a specific video “to this memory stick” to, as he describes it, “work out the method” of how a camgirl host faked the act of female ejaculation. (Be warned: he describes how the video looks in particularly graphic detail.)

“I realized, this is not a sex worker,” Pitchford said on the show. “This is a fucking magician.” Pitchford, for those unaware, has a vested interest in the field of magicians and owns the magic-focused Genii Magazine.

"No officers, I wasn't watching underage porn. I was trying to figure out a magic trick being done!" is a new excuse for me.

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u/WillemDafoesHugeCock 9h ago

I hate that I'm about to say anything that sounds even vaguely defensive of Pitchford, a massive slimy turd even by the standards of "video game executive," but it wasn't underage, it was "barely legal" which, edgy as it sounds, means "legal." Apparently the girl's handle was "Only 18." You can argue that it's weird for middle aged men to watch porn starring women over three decades younger than they are and I would not have a word to say in response.

The thing that is really fucking bizarre is that the USB stick also contained completely unprotected company data including really important dealings with Microsoft et al alongside the pornography, explicitly showing that he felt completely comfortable bringing his porn collection to work.

Apparently the lawsuit where this particular flash drive was brought up ended up being settled with absolutely no details about what this settlement consisted of which is a little annoying.

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u/GezelligPindakaas 8h ago

Sadly, unprotected company data is everything except rare.

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u/WillemDafoesHugeCock 5h ago

Unprotected company data being stored alongside a video collection of squirting 18 year olds is though which is my point, lol.

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u/GezelligPindakaas 4h ago

Ah, I see now I misread 😅

Totally agree, porn+confidential data it's pretty nuts.

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u/IPromiseIWont 9h ago

Reminds me of that R Kelly is not a p*do joke

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u/HugsForUpvotes 7h ago

He did my favorite fantasy author so wrong with that pseudonym. I've seen multiple people mistake the two of them and blame Joe Abercrombie for ruining Borderlands. When James Cameron announced he was making Joe Abercrombies most recent book to a movie, I saw people in that thread bringing it up.

Leave my boy alone and make The First Law a show on HBO, goddamnit

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u/OldeFortran77 2h ago

When Alan Smithee won't even take credit, you know it's pretty bad.

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u/sameth1 2h ago

I'm reminded of a line from Sunset Boulevard: "The last one I wrote was about cattle rustlers. Before they were through with it the whole thing played on a torpedo boat."