Filming of the Borderlands movie began early in 2021, with Hungary standing in for the junkyard wasteworld of Pandora. Test screenings were held in November of 2022, and apparently the response inspired some changes to be made, as Deadline reports that it’s going back for reshoots with a different director in charge.
While gore-lover Eli Roth (Cabin Fever, Hostel) handled primary shooting, Tim Miller (Deadpool, Terminator: Dark Fate) has taken over for the reshoots, which will take two weeks. Deadline reports that it’s an amicable handover, made necessary by Roth starting work on his next project, a horror movie called Thanksgiving.
Thanksgiving is based on one of the fake movie trailers that aired as part of Grindhouse, the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino collaboration from 2007 combining their movies Planet Terror and Death Proof into a double feature complete with mock advertisements for a string of other movies in the same style. Those joke trailers proved so popular that Thanksgiving is the third of them to be transformed into a real movie, following Machete and Hobo with a Shotgun.
Borderlands will star Cate Blanchett as Lilith, Jamie Lee Curtis as Patricia Tannis, Kevin Hart as Roland, Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina, Gina Gershon as Moxxi, Florian Munteaunu as Krieg, and Jack Black as wisecracking robot Claptrap, who everybody loves and nobody hates, not one bit. Apparently Penn Jillette from Penn and Teller has a cameo too.
Who knows how much of the story is being changed by these reshoots, but according to a cheesy plot synopsis from back when filming started, “These unlikely heroes must battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power. The fate of the universe could be in their hands—but they’ll be fighting for something more: each other.”
In 2022 we got two new Borderlands games. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands reskinned the looter-shooter as a loving parody of tabletop RPGs and we thought it was pretty good. New Tales From the Borderlands tried to recapture the glory of Telltale’s Borderlands game and didn’t quite succeed.
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