Gearbox founder and CEO Randy Pitchford didn't extra feel pressure to create a successful film in light of other big video game adaptations when making Lionsgate's upcoming Borderlands movie – in fact, he felt quite the opposite.
"I feel validated. You know, when I started this, the first meeting that Avi Arad – our incredible producer – and I took with RA was in 2011, 13 years ago, and I beat him up for a couple of years. It was the longest courtship ever before I agreed to develop this thing with him. But back then, the expected value was that you can't do a video game movie and expect it to do anything," Pitchford tells 12DOVE. "And now we have a world where all kinds of interesting adaptations are wildly successful, not just video games, but toys. We saw what they did with Lego and what they did with Barbie. Because here's the thing, what we want from a film has nothing to do with the source medium, it's about feelings, and experiences and characters. And it's fun to be taken to a place we can never imagine in our normal world. And a movie can take us there."
A live-action movie based on the Borderlands video game franchise was first announced in 2015, with frequent James Wan collaborator Leigh Whannell set to direct. In 2020, Eli Roth was officially tapped as director. Deadpool director Tim Miller took over directing duties for two weeks of reshoots when Roth was busy with production on his festive slasher Thanksgiving.
"Sometimes the inspiration for that formula, you can invent it. But if you can't, if you can trust because it's already proven to work in another medium, like a video game, well, then the investment and the risks and people's love and time and energy and talent can all go into something like this," Pitchford explains. "And it's unbelievable – it's a miracle that any movie of this scale gets made, you know, the cost involved. And the amount of talent is just a miracle. And to do that you need to have something that people can have confidence and believe in. And I think that what we're learning is that there's a reason why video games are successful and reach people. Not just the gameplay, but the characters and the stories and the universes."
The pic centers on Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a bounty hunter with a mysterious past, who is tasked with returning to her home planet and locating Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), the daughter of a powerful supervillain named Atlas (Edgar Ramirez). Gearbox released the first Borderlands game, a role-playing first-person looter shooter, in 2009 with the franchise going on to spawn multiple games and garner over $1 billion – making it one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time. In past few years, other successful video game franchises, such as Fallout and The Last of Us, have become critically acclaimed television shows, paving the way for more studios to greenlight even more adaptations.
"For game for games like Borderlands that have these unbelievable storylines in these universes that are so rich, and so far out from anything you'd get in any other medium, it's a candy store for filmmaking, and for filmmakers. And so it's just been a joy to collide the worlds. So I think all the success that we've seen with other great adaptations has just been validating and made our process actually easier rather than scary."
Borderlands hits theaters on August 9. For more, check out the ever-growing list of upcming video game movies, or check out our other chat with Randy Pitchford about a potential sequel to the upcoming film.
