Eli Roth isn’t skirting around speaking about how “Borderlands” was both a commercial and creative flop. The video game adaptation grossed $33 million on a budget of approximately $115 million, leading to even Lionsgate CEO Jon Feltheimer admitting that “nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong” during the production, ranging from pandemic delays to reshoots sans writer/director Roth, who moved on to directing “Thanksgiving.”
Now, Roth is that detailing what plagued “Borderlands,” a film that had two Oscar winners (Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis) at its center. Roth confirmed during Matthew Belloni’s podcast “The Town” (via Dark Horizons) that he was not on set for the reshoots, saying, “[I] was doing ‘Thanksgiving,’ and […] I remember [asking myself], ‘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?’”
However, Roth had no qualms with the reshoots themselves. That’s just how it goes with big studio films, as the indie horror director said.
“I believe that, once they [the studio] pay you, that’s part of the deal,” Roth said, citing how the film was also reworked to get a PG-13 rating. “If there’s creative differences or they’re doing reshoots without you, and say, ‘This is what we’re doing’ and you’re the figurehead, you get out there, you put on a smile and people smack you in the face. You gotta stand there and go, ‘OK’. […] By the way, I would work with Lionsgate again. I just wouldn’t work with them under those circumstances.”
Roth added that COVID was a large part of the piecemeal production of “Borderlands,” too. The film was in pre-production in 2020, with shooting beginning in 2021.
“None of us anticipated how complicated things were gonna be with COVID,” Roth said. “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…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.”
He continued, “I think we all thought we could pull it off and we got our asses handed to us a bit.”
Yet the experience of “Borderlands” inspired Roth to reconsider his career; he announced the launch of his independent studio The Horror Section, which will be dedicated to releasing “uncut, hardcore” genre films. The Horror Section is a crowdfunding investment which raised about $2 million, or half of its $5 million target.
“I thought, this isn’t really me and this isn’t what I want to do going forward,” Roth said of “Borderlands,” adding, “So let me get back to my roots.”
