While it is certainly par for the course for many Hollywood movies to rush themselves to home release on streaming services within a month or two, Borderlands is doing close to an all-time speed run.
The massive box office miss will be headed to digital platforms on August 30, 11 days from now and just three weeks after it released in theaters on August 9.
This doesn’t mean it will be streaming on a specific service for free, but rather be available for digital purchase and rental on August 30 in places like Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV. It will make its way to being on an actual service later, but not yet. Lionsgate movies stream a lot of places so I’m not sure where that would be.
Borderlands remains one of the worst-reviewed major movies of the year with a 10% critic score, which also puts it around the bottom ten of all video game movie adaptations in history. This was not offset by a mass surge of fan support from gamers, and in two weekends now, the film has only made $18 million worldwide on a budgets north of $120 million and marketing costs on top of that. As it stands, it’s probably going to lose $100 million or more.
The digital release is meant to erase a barrier to paying for the movie: actually going to the theater, but when these new movies come out it’s often still $20 to rent them initially. Later it may go down to $6-7, but when most people say they’ll “wait until it hits streaming” they mean “wait until it hits streaming and I don’t have to pay for it.”
We’ve heard little from Gearbox about the film since release, but it’s pretty clear it has killed ambitions for expansions of a live action franchise. Borderlands 4 remains an unannounced, huge project in the works for Gearbox and 2K, but given how involved leadership of Gearbox was in this movie, that does raise some questions about what they may think will be good in a fourth game at this point.
There’s no spinning how this went. It’s a massive miss and box office shipwreck in an age when we are in fact getting quite a number of great video game adaptations across film, TV and animation. Borderlands tried to tone itself down to appeal to general audiences who didn’t care while rewriting its lore enough where game fans didn’t like it either. And this is the result. See for yourself on August 30 if you skipped it in the theater, like most did.
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