Well, the feature film adaptation of “Borderlands” is staking a claim for next summer. Lionsgate announced Thursday that Eli Roth’s all-star action fantasy is arriving in theaters on Aug. 9, 2024.
That will put it alongside Sony’s “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” Universal’s “Speak No Evil” and 20th Century Studios’ “Alien Romulus” — all among the first tentpoles slated for August of next summer.
The video game adaptation, which stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black (as a robot), Edgar Ramirez, Ariana Greenblatt, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon, and Jamie Lee Curtis, is cowritten by Roth writer Joe Crombie, an apparent pseudonym.
“Borderlands” is based on the Gearbox Software first-person shooting video game series of the same name that began in 2009, and it was greenlit back in 2015. Filming lasted from April 1–June 22, 2021, in Budapest, Hungary.
Lionsgate announced in January of this year that the picture would undergo two weeks of reshoots directed not by Roth (reportedly due to his commitments to Sony’s “Thanksgiving”) but by “Deadpool” director Tim Miller.
Come what may, “Borderlands” is an all-star video game adaptation from a well-known genre filmmaker during a month when, last year, theaters were nearly empty. “Borderlands” may be the next surprisingly decent (“Pokemon: Detective Pikachu”) and surprisingly successful (“The Super Mario Bros. Movie”) video game adaptation.
That Lionsgate isn’t going to rush the film out to theaters just for the sake of it along with this far-off announcement can be taken as a sign of measured confidence.
