Bet you didn't see this one coming.
Borderlands director Eli Roth

Director Eli Roth is about to expand his portfolio just a wee bit. The Hostel and Cabin Fever director has been brought on to direct a movie adaptation of Borderlands. The Gearbox Borderlands. The Borderlands with a beatboxing robot, fart jokes, a unicorn that poops loot, and tons of gear to try to find.

Yes, that Borderlands is somehow going to become a movie.

Eli Roth will be working on the film adaptation of the Borderlands franchise for Lionsgate. Craig Mazin, who won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series from his work on Chernobyl, will write the script to the Borderlands film. It will be produced by Avi Arad and Ari Arad through Arad Productions.

The latest release in the franchise was Borderlands 3, which came out on most platforms back on September 13, 2019. The shlooter FPS is available for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Stadia, and is still an Epic Games Store (affiliate link) exclusive for the PC. Though that exclusivity should be expiring in about a month.

Roth seems to be quite excited about the idea. He issued the following remarks in a statement.

"I’m so excited to dive into the world of Borderlands, and I could not be doing it with a better script, producing team and studio. I have a long, successful history with Lionsgate — I feel like we have grown up together and that everything in my directing career has led to a project of this scale and ambition."
For those of you who, like me, are wondering just how those games will translate to a big screen adaptation, there is a simple answer: The Borderlands movie will be a re-imagining of the franchise. The movie will be executive produced by Randy Pitchford (yes, that Randy Pitchford) and Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.

Recent movie adaptations based off of video game franchises have actually been quite good as of late. Detective Pikachu was apparently rather good and pulled in over $433M worldwide. Now we have Sonic the Hedgehog also doing quite well, having surpassed $128M worldwide after less than a week at a time where the Coronavirus has a significant portion of the world's population under quarantine. The Resident Evil films have always done very well globally, mainly thanks to regions that aren't North America.

It's either it does well or it's the next Alone in the Dark. Let's get a little taste of Roth's legacy as a director...


Honestly? This one could go either way.