Video game movies finally started to attain some level of consistency in order to shake off the perennial tag that it’s a cursed genre, but Eli Roth’s Borderlands has been doing a stellar job of harking back to the bad old days when virtually every console-to-screen adaptation was destined to suck.
Production wrapped on the star-studded blockbuster boasting Kevin Hart, Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Edgar Ramirez, Jack Black, and countless others among its ensemble in the summer of 2021, with the end product initially scheduled to hit theaters in November of the following year.
Of course, that didn’t happen, and Borderlands doesn’t even have a release date at all anymore. Roth may have tried to shut down the speculation that he was booted from the project by a dissatisfied studio, but the fact remains that Deadpool and Terminator: Dark Fate‘s Tim Miller was drafted in for extensive reshoots.
Not only that, but a recent listing on the Writers Guild of America website has named no less than seven credited writers on the project, with one of them unexpectedly being The Idol creator Sam Levinson, hardly a ringing endorsement given that his HBO series was pummeled into the ground.
In addition, The Last of Us showrunner Craig Mazin’s name has disappeared completely in favor of the mysterious (and seemingly non-existent) Joe Crombie, leading many to interpret that he’s simply opted to have his name excised from Borderlands entirely instead of being associated with the finished film.
At this stage, Borderlands has an awful lot to do in order to convince anyone that it isn’t a disaster waiting to happen, but it feels as though we won’t be getting those answers for a long time.