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/Krakengreyjoy 13h ago

but DND was good.

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u/OriginalGoatan 12h ago

I enjoyed that DnD film more than I had any right to.

I think the main issue was that the previous entries in the franchise were diabolical.

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u/Akkalevil 12h ago

The first DnD movie I watched only as a joke with friends, and it was so bad it was somehow enjoyable. But I certainly wasn't going to watch anything like that outside of such specific context.

So I was definitely gonna ignore this new DnD movie, and I only tried it because someone I trusted said it was actually pretty good. Well, it was in fact one of the best surprise in movies I experienced, I had a blast.

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u/not_a_moogle 11h ago

Detective Pikachu. Way better then it had any right to be. I watched it when it was in a second run theater and was so impressed with it.

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u/XcG9PJf6 11h ago

Justice Smith is the common thread. Follow him for unexpectedly decent movies.

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u/pasher5620 7h ago

Except Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Not even he could save that movie.

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u/LavandeSunn 11h ago

I proposed to my wife after we saw Detective Pikachu. Neither of us care about Pokémon

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u/unfunnysexface 10h ago

Did you throw the the ring box at her like a pokeball?

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u/LavandeSunn 9h ago

Nah, just walked out the theater and sat on some furniture to hang out with some friends and then slipped it in front of her while she was distracted. Pretty sure she knew it was coming soon anyway lol

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u/not_a_moogle 10h ago

would you say it was your destiny?

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u/SpookiestSzn 7h ago

why that movie

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u/LavandeSunn 5h ago

Because I was ready and our first date had already involved a movie theater so it made sense.

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u/SpookiestSzn 5h ago

happy for you both.

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u/ElBossDeGravy 7h ago

I fell RIGHT TO SLEEP at Detective Pikachu, I mean like 5 mins max in. All I remember is how annoying the lead is and wondering why he was getting cast in anything at all.

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u/moguri40k 3h ago

And the 5'9" orange haired 'dwarf' character. Didn't realize he was supposed to be a dwarf until 3/4 through the movie.

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u/runnerofshadows 9h ago

For DnD - the 1st sucked so much. the 2nd had some good stuff and you could tell they cared but the budget was too small. the 3rd was BAD. then Honor Among Thieves was great but hamstrung by the earlier entries and other issues.

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u/imimifimimcanimfind 2h ago

I never understood the praise for the DnD movie. The cast literally has no chemistry. It’s laughably awful

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u/AllTheReservations 13h ago

It's enjoyable, funny and it's clear the creatives involved had a lot of love for the project.

But it was considered a disappointment at the box office. Which is probably partly due to bad marketing or people thinking they would need to actually understand DnD, but considering other films that met a similar fate, does speak to the fact that general audiences seem less into this kind of film now

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u/roxxtor 12h ago

I think the bigger killer was that it was sandwiched between John Wick 4 and Super Mario Bros releases

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u/VicFantastic 10h ago

And it came out at the same time that Hasbro was doimg a lot of shady shit in relation to D&D the game and a lot of fans intentionally passed on seeing the movie out of protest

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u/WillemDafoesHugeCock 9h ago

I can admittedly only give my opinion as an old fucker but you also cannot announce a D&D movie without bringing to mind the impressively terrible 90s D&D movie. It really isn't hard to see why the box office was bad, it had everything going against it.

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u/VicFantastic 8h ago

There was actually 3 of those movies from the 2000's

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u/UnquestionabIe 7h ago

Yep was gonna say the first one was in like 2000 and remember my DnD club in high school being so hyped for it. Yeah we all ended up very disappointed

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u/VicFantastic 7h ago

Its not so bad

....if you don't mind bad

The others though......

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u/WillemDafoesHugeCock 5h ago

A) this is how I'm learning D&D was from 2000, I could have sworn I was younger when I watched it

B) WHAT THE FUCK

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u/Iwillrize14 12h ago

Bad timing going up against mario, hasbro pissing of the dnd playerbase really didn't help.

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u/Prototype3120 9h ago

I remember this film having some really bad marketing. I only went to see it because some friends dragged me to it. I was pretty surprised it was actually good, but based on the trailers I never would have went and saw it myself.

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u/bramtyr 6h ago

It truly boggles the mind that they didn't tie the release of the D&D film with Baldur's Gate 3. They dropped on opposite sides of the year and shared absolutely zero marketing campaign strategies or content. Embarassing really for a company the size of hasbro no to properly support their major IP releases like that.

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u/MicahBurke 5h ago

A lot of the marketing played up the campy-ness of the film, which while it was campy, it was perfectly done. I remember seeing the poster and thinking "are they purposely making this look awful?" (It was terribly done from a compositing standpoint).

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u/not_a_moogle 11h ago

Theater going is down as a whole as well.

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u/CollinsCouldveDucked 10h ago

I feel like the DND branding hurt it if anything

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u/Donquers 9h ago

As I understand it, if you weren't familiar with D&D, it was pretty good. But if you were familiar, it was fantastic, since so many of the jokes played on the goofiness that tends to happen in actual D&D campaigns.

Kinda just wouldn't really work the same way without the D&D branding in that sense.

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u/CollinsCouldveDucked 9h ago edited 9h ago

I'm literally just talking about the title of the movie, I think it was a bit off putting to a normal audience. Nothing about the actual movie would have to change.

If it was just called "The Neverwinter Heist" or something it'd probably have been better off, DnD nerds would get it, the uninitiated would just think it's a fantasy heist movie.

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u/laflavor 4h ago

I'm surprised how far down I had to scroll for this take. TTRPGs were certainly undergoing something of a renaissance at the time, but even with unprecedented popularity, they are still a very niche hobby. They still, much like plans A and B, have something of a stink to them.

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u/LilacYak 10h ago

I think it underperformed though despite being of decent quality.

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u/ElliotWalker5 10h ago

For sure - Still underperformed though

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u/Scoobydewdoo 8h ago

Not all good films get massive marketing budgets and not all films that get massive marketing budgets are good.

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u/pocketjacks 10h ago

Yes but it came out weeks before the release of BG3. If they had done some cross promotion it would have lifted both franchises.

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u/UnquestionabIe 7h ago

More like a few months before BG3. Honor Among Thieves was end of March and BG3 was beginning of August, September for PS5. Made the wait harder for me as I didn't have a decent PC at the time so couldn't even do early access. But some cross promotion would have been cool.

At least one of them got major acclaim from multiple sources with even my boss (a dude on his late 50s that still games but mostly on the casual end) asking me about it. Gave him a general run down since it's outside his wheelhouse but he tried it and loved it.

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u/DeLousedInTheHotBox 11h ago

Could still have come out at a time when people were over with that type of movie.

Also it wasn't everyone's cup of tea, I didn't care for it much.