Filming the Borderlands movie started in early 2021with Hungary replacing the junkyard desert of Pandora. Test impressions (opens in new tab) were held in November 2022, and apparently the response inspired some changes, such as deadline (opens in new tab) reports that it is going back for reshoots with a different director.
While gore aficionado Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel) handled primary filming, Tim Miller (Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate) has taken over filming, which will run for two weeks. Deadline reports that it’s an amicable transfer, made necessary by Roth starting work on his next project, a horror movie called Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is based on one of the fake movie trailers that aired as part of Grindhouse, the 2007 Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaboration, which combined their films Planet Terror and Death Proof into a double feature, complete with fake ads for a range of other movies in the same style. Those prank trailers proved so popular that Thanksgiving is the third to be made into an actual movie, after Machete and Hobo with a Shotgun.
Borderlands stars Cate Blanchett as Lilith, Jamie Lee Curtis as Patricia Tannis, Kevin Hart as Roland, Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina, Gina Gershon as Moxxi, Florian Munteaunu as Krieg and Jack Black as the smart robot Claptrap, who everyone loves and no one hates, not even a little. Apparently Penn Jillette from Penn and Teller also has a cameo.
Who knows how much of the story will be changed by these reshoots, but according to one cheesy plot synopsis from when filming began: “These unlikely heroes must battle alien monsters and dangerous outlaws to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power. The fate of the universe may rest in their hands – but they will be fighting for something more: each other.”
In 2022 we got two new Borderlands games. Little Tina’s Wonderlands reimagined the looter-shooter as a loving parody of tabletop RPGs and we thought it was pretty good. New stories from the border area tried to recapture the glory of Telltale’s Borderlands game and didn’t quite succeed.