The theatrical run of the Borderlands film is over, and much like my very brief career as a cook at KFC, it did not end well and nobody is surprised. After flopping badly (I mean, badly) in its opening weekend, movie industry research and data firm The Numbers (via Forbes) says Borderlands managed to draw in a total of just under $31 million globally—a fraction of what it cost to make and market.
Look, in some contexts $31 million is a lot of money. If I had $31 million, for instance, someone else would be writing this story. But in the context of a Hollywood film starring Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Jamie Lee Curtis? That’s something else entirely.
Variety estimates the Borderlands flick had a production budget of roughly $115 million, and then cost another $30 million to promote and distribute. If accurate (and Variety is usually pretty good about these things) that means Borderlands earned just enough in theaters to cover its marketing budget.
So that’s bad, yeah, but just how bad is it? With help from Google and The Numbers’ movie comparison feature, I can tell you this: It’s really bad.
I present to you…
An Incomplete List of Shitty Videogame Movies That Made More Money Than Borderlands
(in no particular order)
- Warcraft ($439 million)
- Max Payne ($88 million)
- Doom ($59 million)
- Street Fighter ($99 million)
- Assassin’s Creed ($241 million)
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time ($336 million)
- Hitman ($99 million)
- Mortal Kombat (but Mortal Kombat is actually good) ($122 million)
- Need for Speed ($194 million)
- Five Nights at Freddy’s ($297 million)
- Uncharted ($401 million)
One big-budget, big(ish)-cast Hollywood film Borderlands managed to beat, which I bring up only because I paid good money to see it in theaters and I’m still sore about the whole thing, is Wing Commander, an utterly execrable celluloid waste of time and effort that bumbled to $11.5 million globally. Frankly I’m surprised it did that well.
There is some small solace for Borderlands amidst all this wailing and gnashing of box office receipts: It at least handily beat anything ever done by Uwe Boll, the infamously bad director of infamously bad videogame films who dunked on the film in August. Boll’s House of the Dead, apparently his biggest success, earned just $14 million globally at the box office; on the other hand, its production budget was reportedly just $7 million. Perhaps a better example is his later flick, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, which somehow starred Jason Statham, Leelee Sobieski, Ron Perlman, John Rhys-Davies, Claire Forlani, Matthew Lilard, Ray Liotta, and Burt Freakin’ Reynolds, and pulled in just about the same amount of money at the box office as House of the Dead on a $60 million production. Win some, lose some.
In any event, our long national nightmare is over, and there’s still a chance that Borderlands will recoup at least some of its budget on direct-to-home streaming services, which it was unceremoniously relegated to just three weeks after its theatrical debut. Enough to turn it into a money-maker? Well, no, but sometimes “slightly less awful than it could’ve been” is the best you’re going to do.