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On the surface, a Borderlands movie makes perfect sense. When video game mega-publisher 2K released the first entry in 2009, it quickly accrued a fanbase—one that only grew over the next 10 years, during which developers Gearbox Software and 2K Australia pumped out a total of four entries in the franchise. Borderlands bore the hallmarks of many popular games during the 2010s: quirky characters, crude humor, a unique, cartoonish visual style, a vast planet to roam, and, most importantly, procedurally generated weapons (known as loot), with which players could shoot at aliens until they explode into a melange of blood and guts. This formula resonated with players to the tune of critical acclaim, many millions of copies sold, and $1 billion in revenue. Based on those metrics, a move to the big screen seemed inevitable.
But that was the 2010s, and this is now. While Borderlands once captured the zeitgeist, that’s hardly been the case in this decade. Barring a handful of spinoffs, the last major Borderlands release came in 2019—five very long years ago, and 10 years after the series began. While well-received, Borderlands 3 arrived at a time when players were turning against games of its ilk. The industry had begun to move away from the random collectible-driven gameplay that Borderlands helped to popularize, as completist players bemoaned the amount of tedious work required to find unique loot. Worse, publishers had begun to abuse and degrade the system by monetizing it, incentivizing players to pay up in order to get items that technically were available for free—if they wanted to spend untold hours to find them.
Lionsgate couldn’t necessarily have predicted, when it began working on a film adaptation of the franchise in 2015, that the game would feel like a relic by the time that movie hit theaters. But by 2024, its potty-mouth sense of humor has aged poorly and its characters have all but disappeared from the zeitgeist. The fondness fans feel is, if…
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