"It could always be worse" is something I try to keep in mind as I lurch and stumble through this extended Gong Show called life: As bad as any given situation is, there's almost always room for it to slide even further down into the cosmic crap bucket. And such is the case with the recent Borderlands movie: Yeah, it really sucked, but Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford recently reassured The Gamer that it could've sucked a whole lot more.
"It would have been way worse if I directed it," Pitchford said at Gamescom. "I'm not a filmmaker. Eli Roth is an awesome filmmaker. I promise you, if I directed that movie, it'd be a disaster."
Okay, but here's the thing Randy: It was a disaster. Nothing against Eli Roth, who I'm quite sure really is a better filmmaker than you or I, but the Borderlands movie has a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is somehow actually up from the 7% it was rocking when PC Gamer film critic/victim Joshua Wolens compared it to Uwe Boll's worst crimes against cinema.
It also, lest anyone thinks Borderlands is one of those movies that makes a ton of money even though critics hate it, was a major box office bomb: It ended its theatrical run earning just $31 million, just barely enough to cover its marketing and distribution costs and significantly less than the 2005 Doom movie starring Karl Urban and The Rock.
Did you secretly direct the Borderlands movie, Randy? Because that seems pretty disastrous to me.
Echoing comments he made in September 2024, Pitchford compared the Borderlands movie to The Beatles: He's a huge fan of the band, but finds some of their work "unlistenable." Should Ringo, Paul, George, and John have been told, after releasing "All You Need Is Love," to never again make music? I might vote "yes" on that one, but that's probably not the popular position and certainly Pitchford would not agree.
"That's not the attitude," he said. "You know, keep making music. I'm glad you tried something. Yeah, go for it. Please make more.
"My attitude is, if there are great creators, artists, entertainers that have something to say and they think they can only do it with Borderlands, and they can demonstrate that they can do it, I want to enable that. We don't always succeed, but we’ve got to keep swinging."
Frankly, I respect that attitude. Creativity is inherently risky, and you're not going to get far if you're unwilling to roll the dice. But I also think that at least part of the problem with the Borderlands film is that it didn't take risks: As poor Josh wrote, it's a film made up of cliches, with "the feeling of creative writing homework completed just before the deadline, a collection of overworn tropes stretched to fill a word count, or a studio-mandated length of at least an hour and a half."
So, could the Borderlands movie have been worse? Sure! Jack Black might have shown up at your theater to ensure everyone was sufficiently hyped for the whole Claptrap shitting bullets thing (he apparently does that from time to time), or somebody could've laced the popcorn with anthrax. But does that mean we're ready to start looking at it as anything but a disaster? Put it this way: I think there are reasonable odds the Borderlands film would have actually been better if Randy had directed it, if only because it might have at least been bad in an interesting way. Maybe they'll give him a shot at the next one.
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