‘Borderlands’ Blunder Proves Hollywood Hasn’t Mastered Adapting Video Games to Film

Heading into its second weekend, Lionsgate’s “Borderlands” doesn’t stand much of a chance to improve upon its $8.6 million bomb of a start.

As much as Nintendo and Universal’s “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” last year lifted gaming IP’s prospects at the box office, a project like “Borderlands” was bound to expose the classically tricky work of film studios relying on built-in audiences from entirely separate mediums.

Of all the gaming adaptations that opened wide within the last decade, “Borderlands” is nearly at the bottom, ranking above Sony’s “Monster Hunter” and “Resident Evil” adaptations that released in a COVID-addled theatrical landscape. Its opening is comparable to 20th Century’s “Assassin’s Creed” adaptation, which struck out with a $10 million opening, was a critical disaster and cost more than $100 million to produce, as did “Borderlands.”

But unlike “Assassin’s Creed,” “Borderlands” followed a climate that has warmed up tremendously to video games. Aside from “Mario,” “Fallout” and “The Last of Us” are tremendous hits for Amazon Prime Video and HBO, respectively, while gaming itself remains a $200 billion industry, much bigger than Hollywood’s traditional markets.

“Borderlands” is not a franchise at the scale of “Grand Theft Auto,” but it has been a breadwinner for parent Take-Two Interactive, which publishes it under 2K Games. “Borderlands 3,” the last mainline entry in 2019, is estimated to have sold around 20 million units, and Take-Two in June closed a deal to acquire Gearbox Software, its developer, from Embracer Group for $460 million.

However, fans of the games felt Lionsgate’s film did not do a dutiful job capturing its world, receiving it poorly alongside critics. Sandwiched between the releases of Disney’s R-rated “Deadpool & Wolverine” spectacle and its new gory entry in the “Alien” franchise, “Borderlands” was an uncharacteristically toned-down effort from Lionsgate, which released a PG-13 cut, despite the games’ graphic ESRB ratings.

Even stranger, the film was directed by Eli Roth, known for gore fests like last year’s “Thanksgiving,” not to mention Tim Miller, who directed 2016’s “Deadpool” and extensive reshoots for “Borderlands.”

Development for “Borderlands” stretched back as far as 2012 and at one point involved “The Last of Us” co-creator Craig Mazin, before he exited the project, an indication of the typical development hell that has long plagued film adaptations of games. This was the case for “Halo,” which languished as a film project in the hands of talent including Peter Jackson, Neill Blomkamp and Alex Garland before it was transformed into an original Paramount+ series.

And therein lies the problem. “Mario,” “The Last of Us,” “Fallout” and “Five Nights at Freddy’s” may lead the pack of successful efforts mending Hollywood’s relationship with the games industry — but a culling of such adaptations is already underway.

Most of the upcoming movies and shows based on gaming IP are sequels and returning programs, aside from animated “Tomb Raider” and “Devil May Cry” series at Netflix, Amazon’s Japanese-language adaptation of “Yakuza” and Warner Bros.’ big “Minecraft” bet.

Missing is “Halo,” which was canceled after two seasons, while “Knuckles,” a spinoff of Paramount’s successful “Sonic” movies, became the most-watched original series on Paramount+ in May but hasn’t been upgraded from miniseries status. Paramount’s TV studio has since been shuttered by Paramount Global, with all current projects moved under CBS Studios.

Other highly anticipated adaptations are falling apart or being scaled back significantly. Netflix’s series take on PlayStation hit “Horizon Zero Dawn” is reportedly not moving forward, while the streamer’s film rendition of “BioShock,” another major property at Take-Two's 2K label, was “reconfigured” to be a “more personal” film with a reduced budget.

There is no question the latter is a consequence of new Netflix film chief Dan Lin steering the platform away from big-budget films as it invests more in actual games. On top of that, hit Netflix series “Arcane” is ending in November after just two seasons, the first having won an Emmy.

Given how “BioShock” takes place in a sprawling underwater city and “Horizon” revolves around a hunter fighting giant robotic monsters, producing live-action adaptations intended to look more realistic than the games themselves makes cost-cutting difficult. 

“Halo” struggled greatly with this problem. Despite being a pivotal sci-fi action franchise that legitimized Xbox, its TV counterpart frequently dialed back action sequences. In fact, a YouTube compilation of all of protagonist Master Chief’s action scenes in the nine-episode first season of “Halo” is approximately six minutes long. The show’s attempts to fill out episode runtimes involved giving the super soldier a non-canon sex life, among other significant deviations from the games. 

Even “The Last of Us” hasn’t escaped financial difficulties. As much as the show succeeded in delivering a faithful adaptation to wary gamers and attracting a wide swath of newcomers, its first season’s budget exceeded $100 million, higher than any of the first five seasons of “Game of Thrones.”

And like the second season of “House of the Dragon,” the next run of “The Last of Us” in 2025 will be two episodes shorter as HBO parent Warner Bros. Discovery counts its pennies. 

It’s difficult to see Hollywood’s embrace of gaming IP as wholly optimistic when top gaming execs aren’t feigning positivity. When asked last week about expected revenue from the “Borderlands” film, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said, “The value of those licenses is typically not all that significant, even in great success,” echoing his dismissiveness a year prior when he described film and TV projects as “very challenged asset classes” during an earnings call. 

After all, the challenge of ongoing layoffs and another SAG-AFTRA strike already preoccupies the industry at a time when Hollywood wants gaming to solve its own hurdles.