Eli Roth Says Pandemic Problems Hurt Borderlands

The Borderlands movie came out last year and was largely met with derision, then indifference. What did the movie in? You’ll get a different answer depending on who you ask, but director Eli Roth thinks part of the issue was when it was made.

In case you forgot, Borderlands began filming in 2021 during the early days of the covid-19 pandemic. Speaking in a recent episode of The Town podcast, Roth recalled how no one—specifically during that production, or Hollywood overall—”anticipated how complicated things were gonna be with covid.”

Back then, things were so chaotic because distancing protocols meant “we couldn’t prep in a room together. I couldn’t be with my stunt people or do pre-vis, everyone’s spread all over the place.”

“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,” Roth continued. Making a big-budget movie at that size was a challenge, and a humbling one. (“I think we all thought we could pull it off and we got our asses handed to us a bit,” he admitted.)

For Roth, things were further complicated by him filming his slasher movie Thanksgiving in 2023, prompting Deadpool director Tim Miller to lead Borderlands‘ reshoots in 2023. Said reshoots also contained new pages from writer Zak Olkewicz, which built off the rewrites already done to Craig Mazin’s initial 2020 script.

So by the time he’d moved onto Thanksgiving, Roth basically knew what was going with Borderlands as much as we did. When he finally watched it, he noted how surreal it was 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.” None of this soured his relationship with Lionsgate, but it did teach him to stop taking the hits for something he was only half-involved with and prompted a return back to horror.

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