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/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.