Boll posted an image on social media he's nicked from IGN, which says the film only made $8.8 million on its opening weekend, against a budget of $115 million. "Haha," writes Boll. "My movies were rated R and made more money than this. Now you wish I directed."

Let's put the last part aside for a moment: have Boll's movies really made more than $8.8 million? They have if you add a bunch of them together. Twitter user StopSkeletons replied to Boll with some of the stats: Boll's biggest success was House of the Dead, which opened to $5.5 million with a final gross of $13.8 million. Add the opening weekends from Alone in the Dark ($2.8 million) and Bloodrayne ($1.5 million) and you've got $9.8 million, albeit spread across three movies (Boll has of course directed many more).

Our man Uwe's response? The utterly absurd claim that his movies have been illegally downloaded 41 billion (yes, "billion" with a "b") times. The discourse does not elevate from there, with Boll wading in to other replies to call people nerds, idiot sandwiches, and of course the old classic "your mother". 

"Eli Roth/Uwe Boll boxing match, please," writes Naro Video. "Winner gets to direct the Zelda movie." My favourite reply, and presumably one of Boll's too because he reposted it, is that Simpsons meme about Martin dunking on Bart:

Boll isn't done, of course. He later reposted his original mockery, adding "But will the gamers contact the makers of Stride Gum and persuade them to give a free pack of gum to each person that signs the petition Eli Roth can no longer direct?"

If you're struggling to parse this, I got you: It's a reference to a campaign sponsored by Stride Gum way back in the 2000s, where the company offered a free packet of gum to everyone who signed a petition demanding that Boll stop directing terrible movies. As you can see it didn't work.

Finally, Boll's claim that "now you wish I directed." I can't find any reference to Boll ever being considered to direct the Borderlands movie, but Boll frequently puts himself forward for any and every project going: and is known for a long list of videogame adaptations. He may well have thrown his hat in the ring at some point, and was unceremoniously ignored.

Well… it's odd to find oneself feeling a bit bad for Eli Roth, but Uwe Boll really does inspire the strangest reactions. I haven't seen it and Borderlands may be a bit of a disaster but, in all fairness, I find it hard to imagine that it's worse than a Uwe Boll movie.

"Jonah [Jonathan Nolan] explicitly told me, use the game as a reference," Harvey told PC Gamer. Nolan wanted his team to "lean into the world for what it is, and take the elements from that world," but also use their own imagination and creativity, Harvey said. "Don't carbon copy anything," Nolan told him.

But rules were made to be broken. According to Harvey, an opportunity presented itself during shooting when costume designer Amy Wescott "dressed this [actor] like somebody right out of the game."

"So I took that character and that likeness and literally made it one of the characters from the game, and I figured, you know what? It was such a [minor] character. Nobody's ever going to catch it," he said.

Harvey's make-up based homage to the games was so subtle even the show's crew, including Nolan himself—a self-proclaimed Fallout fanatic—didn't notice it. Eagle-eyed fans, though? They didn't miss a thing.

"[Nolan] didn't catch it. The writers didn't catch it. But boy, Reddit caught it, and they went wild for it. They went nuts over it, and they're like, 'We know exactly who that character is. We can tell you what game, what map, and what that person was.'"

The person in question is a wandering arms dealer from Fallout 4 named Cricket who occasionally stops outside Diamond City and Vault 81. Personally I'm not sure if I even remember Cricket from the game, because who remembers a minor character you buy junk from one or twice?

Die-hard Fallout fans, that's who. In the show the character's name is Rink, and she's in a single scene that's about two minutes long, during which she maybe has ten seconds of total screen time. That was plenty for Reddit's eagle-eyed Fallout community.

In episode 5, Max and Lucy have teamed up and are about to cross a bridge when they spot two survivors heading across the same bridge in the opposite direction. Lucy and Max attempt to avoid a violent confrontation, but this is Fallout—sometimes no matter how high your speech score is, you just can't stop the bullets from flying.

If you look below at a few images of Rink from the show compared to Cricket from Fallout 4, you can definitely see that they're the same person: her wardrobe, her gaunt appearance, the redness under her eyes, right down to the faint scar across her eyebrow. 

No doubt. She may be called Rink on the show, but that's definitely Cricket.

"That was my one little easter egg that I was hoping nobody would catch right away," Harvey said. "They jumped on that so fast. So, kudos to the level and the depth that these fans will go."

As per GamesIndustry.biz, the global box office numbers are out and, oof, they aren't looking that much better. The grand gross (as in gross income, I'm not just being extra mean) of the Borderlands movie? $16.5 million.

As an exercise, let's do some quick, ad-hoc maths on how much money Lionsgate needs to make to even start breaking even. The movie cost $145 million to make if you squish those production and marketing/distribution values together. The studio claims that 60% of production costs—that's $69 million—were covered by presales. Slap the $16.5 million on top of that, and you get $85.5 million. There's a remaining dent of $59.5 million to find the dough for.

Except it's even worse than that. Box office numbers are taken before a movie theatre gets its money, a cut that can be anywhere from 20%-50% depending on a number of factors including the theatre and the studio's pull over it (large productions will often see the studio raking in more, smaller theatres will often get worse deals, and so on).

The exact number landing in the studio's pocket is hard to call, but you can reasonably say that Lionsgate is (in the most optimistic scenario) seeing about two thirds of it.

In terms of how that'll impact the actual Borderlands franchise? Luckily for Gearbox and Take-Two Interactive, not at all. In an interview with IGN, Take-Two's CEO—who wants us to give the movie a chance—emphasised that "the performance of the film wouldn't have a financial impact on us or on the franchise one way or another."

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, who has been severely posting through it, doubly confirms this on Twitter: "Whatever was spent on the movie came from the movie studio, Lionsgate," Pitchford writes, before launching into the following spiel:

"We're working on our games and are pretty happy that there's a whole lot of people who now know about Borderlands that didn't know about it before. I'm stoked you think we do better with our games than what some of the best actors and filmmakers on the planet did with the movie—that's super flattering! You did see the movie, right?"

In fairness to Pitchford, it's likely many of those dunking on it didn't see the movie, statistically speaking. PC Gamer's news writer Joshua Wolens did, though, and he didn't like it—though it seems his "disconcerting impression it could end up a (relative) box office success" has not materialised.

It's hard to take anything good from that outcome, but Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford has found an upside.

"So what you're saying is: You like what my friends and I do with our Borderlands videogames even more than you like what some of the biggest and best cast and crew of film makers on the planet have done," Pitchford tweeted over the weekend. "I'm super flattered! We're working extra hard four you on what's next."

(I assume that "four" is not a misspelling but rather a bit of wordplay teasing the all-but-confirmed Borderlands 4.)

He repeated the sentiment in a reply-tweet a little later: "I'm actually pretty fucking flattered that people are essentially saying that my team and I are doing a better job building characters and telling stories and making entertainment than this un-fucking-believable cast and crew of some of the biggest and best film makers on the planet. I am super happy to live in that world."

And once more, with feeling:

That's definitely one way to look at it, and while it's not a perspective I would've considered, I have to admit there's some validity to it, if you're willing to squint and tilt your head a bit. Film and games are very different forms of media, and what works for one isn't necessarily going to translate well to the other. The plethora of bad game-based movies is ample evidence of that: A paper-thin excuse to mindlessly blow shit up can work very well for a videogame (see: Borderlands), but it's probably not going to hold up for a couple hours on the big screen (see: Borderlands).

Now, does Pitchford's statement hold water as a defense of the Borderlands movie? Absolutely not. Director Eli Roth said he was inspired to make the film by watching his dog take a dump (nope, not making that up) and I think the results aptly reflect the truth of that tale. It's just a straight-up shitty movie, and there are probably lots of things that people like better: Watching a dog drop a healthy three-coiler on the neighbor's lawn, for instance.

Pitchford rejected suggestions that an R rating, which is more typical of Roth's work, rather than the PG-13 the film ultimately got, would've made any difference.

"I love some gore in the games—I actively work on that!" he tweeted. "But I cannot figure out what mind needs that in order to parse a story as 'good' as if it’s not possible to be 'good' unless there’s a dick or an organ coming out of a body from violence or a bunch of 'fucks' uttered. It’s kind of an absurd argument to me."

At the same time, he seemed to acknowledge in another tweet that the movie was not quite as good as it could have been, because scenes that would've provided proper insight into characterization and motivations ended up on the cutting room floor. "They were great scenes, but I think in post with editors, producers and directors they felt the pace needed to stay quick," Pitchford wrote in response to a user who said the film's characters lacked the depth of those in the games.

"I hope some of the deleted scenes can come out at some point. I think, over all, the decisions were correct given what they had to work with. But it’s interesting to note that there was intention in the script and with what was shot to do what your instincts suggested would’ve been nice to have. Film making is crazy."

So, does that mean we've maybe got a Pitchford Cut to look forward to? Probably not. Echoing comments made by Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick last week, Pitchford said any financial losses on the film would be incurred by the movie studio, not Gearbox: "So I’m not really affected by that, except that if the studio loses money it may not want to make another movie."

Dare to dream and all that, but given the inevitability of second-weekend ticket sales dropoff, I'd guess the odds of Borderlands 2 are not great. Probably for the best.

Ella Purnell, who played Vault Dweller Lucy, wound up being a major makeup challenge, too—just not for the reasons you might think.

"The one thing that a lot of people don't know unless you've done a lot of research on Ella Purnell, she's covered in tattoos. Head to toe, covered in tattoos, " Harvey told PC Gamer. "And for pretty much all of episode one, she's running around in a wedding dress."

Since Purnell's character was raised in an idyllic Vault, it wouldn't make sense for her to have tattoos, "So every day for at least a month, I'm sitting there covering tattoos," Harvey said. "Even down to when she's exiting the super duper Mart, anytime her vault suit is down, I'm covering tattoos."

But that wasn't the only tricky element of Harvey's job. Something else became "part of the biggest challenge" of handling Purnell's makeup: her index finger.

Sorry for the spoilers if you haven't seen it yet, but in one episode of Fallout, Lucy bites off The Ghoul's finger. The Ghoul being The Ghoul, he immediately cuts off Lucy's finger to replace his missing one. Not long after, a Mister Handy robot replaces Lucy's finger with a spare he's got in a drawer. Lucy's finger problem was solved, but the makeup department's was just beginning.

Since Lucy's replacement finger is considerably paler than her skin (it's a corpse's finger, after all) and there's a seam where it was basically welded to her stump, anytime Purnell's hand was seen from then on in the show it needed to look like she had a weird dead finger attached to her, for continuity's sake. This isn't as easy as it sounds.

"It was such a chore, every day, I had to paint her finger," he said. And not just once a day, Harvey said. Continuously throughout the day's shooting he basically had to babysit her hand. "She'd pick up something, she'd put it in her pocket. She'd go wash her hands. Oop, gotta paint her finger [again].

"And the writers promised me, 'Oh, by episode four, we're gonna write something, that [the finger] heals, and you'll never see it again.' I'm like, 'Great, thank you!'"

The writers never came through, however, and Harvey had to continue keeping tabs on Ella Purnell's finger and touch it up constantly. That chore will apparently continue when Fallout returns. "You will see that finger in season two," Harvey said.

Worth it? Well, Fallout is nominated for 16 Emmys, two of them for makeup: both for outstanding prosthetic and non-prosthetic makeup. So, yeah. Probably worth it. 

Kingmakers is a game with a simple premise: What if you could travel back to medieval times with an M4 tank to give the primitive screwheads what-for? It looks like it might be fun, although it doesn't yet have a release date. What it does have, however—and somewhat bafflingly—is a movie deal.

The planned big-screen adaptation is being handled by Story Kitchen, a name that may ring a bell: It's one of the companies behind the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, and has also announced plans to make movies out of Dredge and Sifu, a Disco Elysium television series, and animated series based on Vampire Survivors and Tomb Raider. It holds the rights to many other game properties, according to its website, including It Takes Two, Just Cause, My Friend Pedro, and Slime Rancher.

"The action, world-building, and intriguing sci-fi of Kingmakers make it a perfect concoction to build a propulsive new franchise in Hollywood," Dmitri M. Johnson of Story Kitchen said.

Okay, sure, but that's a lot of weight to put on a game that looks like a playable version of those YouTube videos that pit one Terminator against a million zombies. The Steam page focuses primarily on Kingmakers' combat simulation and doesn't really get into the narrative at all, except to say that you're going back 500 years "to change the course of a bloody war and maybe, if you’re lucky, stave off the apocalypse."

On the other hand, you don't necessarily need George R.R. Martin on the script for this sort of thing to work. Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann was based entirely on the premise, "What if a guy went back in time on a dirtbike?" Army of Darkness rolled with little more than "What if a guy went back in time with a shotgun?" Perhaps the most on-point example is the 1980 cinematic classic The Final Countdown, starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, Charles Durning, and Katharine Ross, which asked, "What if a guy went back in time with a nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier?"

That's not to say that Kingmakers is likely to make for a good movie. We don't even know if it's going to make for a good game at this point. But at least there's plenty of pre-existing material to take inspiration from.

Kingmakers—the game, not the movie—is slated to be out sometime later this year.

Look, the Borderlands film sucks. It sucks bad. This will likely come as zero surprise if you've been online enough to watch even one of the pre-release trailers or catch any of the discourse around them, and if you were lucky enough to avoid that the critical reviews have been brutal: We forced Joshua Wolens to watch it yesterday and it left him longing for the relative pleasures of the famed 1993 stinkeroo Super Mario Bros, which believe it or not is one of the less vicious critiques of the Borderlands film I've read over the past 24 hours.

But critics and audiences can sometimes diverge—plenty of crapola movies attract big audiences and make serious bank—and while I don't think that's likely to happen here, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick hopes it will.

"Let's give the film a chance," Zelnick told IGN. "A lot of people worked really hard on it. The underlying intellectual property is phenomenal, the cast is amazing, I think the look and feel is really terrific. So let's see what audiences have to say."

Zelnick's interest stems from the fact that Gearbox is now a Take-Two property: The publisher acquired Gearbox from the shambolic wreckage of Embracer Group earlier this year for $460 million, which for the record is far less than half of what Embracer paid for Gearbox when it picked up the studio in 2021.

While the Borderlands film has only been out for a day, what audiences have had to say so far has not been good. The "audience score" on Rotten Tomatoes is a lowly 48%, and while that's miles above and beyond the critical consensus—the official Tomatometer score currently sits at an impressively awful 6%—it's still not good.

This weekend will tell the tale: If Borderlands has any shot at filling seats and making back some of its production budget, it's going to happen over the next three days. I don't think any big blockbusters are slated to debut this weekend, which is a little bit of good news for Borderlands, but the Deadpool and Wolverine behemoth is still cruising along—although the fact it's rated R, as opposed to PG-13 as Borderlands is, puts a little space between the two.

The good news for Take-Two is that even if Borderlands does bomb as badly as it so clearly deserves to, it won't make a difference to the company's bottom line: "The performance of the film wouldn't have a financial impact on us or on the franchise one way or another," Zelnick said. A little bit of a lingering bad smell, though? I think that may be tougher to avoid.

Borderlands is not good. It is bad. This will not be news to you. It's in the headlines and in the Twitter posts and in the glazed eyes of audiences pouring out of screenings across the globe. You might have heard the claim that this is a righting of the scale, the karmic rebalance after five-star videogame adaptations like The Last of Us and Fallout. A real Uwe Boll-style stinker to cleanse our palates and remind us that good adaptations are the exception, not the rule. We needed a new Super Mario Bros (1993).

We didn't get one. Borderlands cannot hold a candle to Super Mario Bros. It is not interestingly bad. This is not a film you should ever queue up alongside infamous masterpieces like The Room and Manos: The Hands of Fate. It's just uninspired scene after loosely connected uninspired scene, each populated by a cast of actors who also seem kind of upset about experiencing the Borderlands movie. It has no cheesy, thwarted ambition to redeem it. It never becomes more than a waste of a hundred minutes.

I think it knows that on some level. At one point, alarmingly early on, the film almost seems to get tired of itself, outlining a chunk of the plot in a Cate Blanchett voiceover while playing clips of the Oscar-winning actress tumbling through the desert shooting nameless mooks. It wasn't any better than the rest of the film but it certainly delivered narrative more efficiently, so it was probably my favourite part.

A hail of lead

The plot of Borderlands (the movie) is, in essence, the plot of Borderlands (the game). The first game, I mean. A band of plucky outlaws are on the hunt for the legendary Eridian vault and all its wondrous precursor race techno-treasures, and they're pursued all the way by the evil Atlas Corp.

Congratulations, you now have as much emotional investment in the story of Eli Roth's Borderlands as I do after watching it. It's tempting to put that down to the performances: The main cast alternates between being mystified by the narrative and being annoyed by it. Only Jack Black's Claptrap seems to really get into it, which I suspect is because playing a CG character liberated Black from dragging himself to the set and becoming physically associated with the film.

But I can't really blame them. If you were reading lines as hackneyed as these you'd probably be a bit put out too. Cate Blanchett's bounty hunter (Lilith) actually gives us an "I'm too old for this shit" in one of her very first scenes. At one point, Tiny Tina—Ariana Greenblatt's character, barely comparable to the manic Ashly Burch performance in the games—sets up a joke you can see from space, asking Janina Gavankar's Knoxx "You and what army?" when the bad guys come to abduct her. Gavankar delivers the obvious follow-up, "The one right behind me," with such wooden uncertainty that I wondered if she too couldn't quite believe she was saying it.

It's another cliche in a film made up of them, where every character is a two-dimensional collection of overplayed tropes—world-weary bounty hunter, honourable soldier guy, whacky musclebound sidekick. That might explain why the film can't quite work out how to naturally get you invested in them, a problem it solves by simply telling you to get invested.

Take Kevin Hart's Roland, the bad-soldier-turned-good. Notionally, part of his backstory is that he once had a romantic relationship with Gavankar's evil corpo. This is never really acted out and the two barely share a scene. Instead, Borderlands has an entirely different character deliver the news directly to the camera and then sits back, satisfied it has adequately set up the emotional stakes for their encounter at the film's climax. 

But hey, not to worry: That encounter is immediately undercut by a 'turning C3-PO off in the middle of his emotional speech'-style gag that wasn't funny in Rise of Skywalker and isn't funny any of the multiple times Borderlands does it, either.

Cate Blanchett has a similar thing going on, which you know because of all the times Cate Blanchett says things like 'I am sad about my relationship with my mother.' Other characters note it too: 'Cate Blanchett sure is sad about her mother,' says Jamie Lee Curtis, lips pursed in concern, 'I bet it's because of that time her mother abandoned her.' It's not a plot, it's the bullet points of a plot read aloud, and when the time comes for ol' Cate to finally make her peace with mum, it's just one more entry on a list the film has instructed you to care about. It's hard not to feel like the film can't find a reason to care about its own characters, so why should you?

Please, no more

The Borderlands movie's crime is not simply that it is bad. I've got room in my heart for bad. Some of my favourite things are bad. If this thing had come out and given us a new entry in the ledger of absurd, beautiful trainwrecks, you can bet that I'd be here telling you to get some friends together and give it a shot. Watching something shoot for the moon and end up in the gutter has a charm all its own.

But it's not just bad, it's bland. Tasteless mush that no one involved seemed interested in saving. The entire thing has 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. The only compliment I can truly give it is that it's an excuse to buy a bucket of popcorn. Be warned, though: The popcorn will run out long before the film is over, leaving you to confront the weight of the Borderlands movie in a dark cinema, alone.

Or not quite alone. Like I said, my theatre was discomfitingly crowded, giving me the disconcerting impression it could end up a (relative) box office success. So look forward to Borderlands 2, coming to cinemas near you whether you want it or not. God help us all.

Perhaps the choicest Borderlands smackdown was delivered by Rolling Stone, where reviewer David Fear called it "an insult to gamers, movie lovers, and carbon-based life forms." Which I think is unnecessarily harsh judgment on the tastes of theoretical Silicon-Oxygen-Fluorine biochemistry life forms. They would also hate the Borderlands movie.

"You seriously wonder if the sole purpose of Borderlands is to make every other video game adaptation look a thousand times better in comparison," says Fear. Later saying that "It is, in no uncertain terms, a horrendous waste of time, talent, and pixels. Not even the pleasure of seeing Blanchett twirling pistols and kicking ass can salvage this."

On home turf at IGN, where you might expect a videogame movie to do better, Borderlands failed to land, earning an "Awful" rating from reviewer Matt Donato, who noted that it failed to live up to any of the promise the games hold. The fun locales are there, but they're "all spoonfed, familiar, and as filling as a single rice cake."

Even Variety failed to find anything lovable: "By the time 'Borderlands' unlocks its vault, not even the characters seem to care what’s inside," said Peter Debruge.

What I found to be the finest summary of critic views, however, comes from The Wrap via writer William Bibbiani. Bibbiani's review notes all the ways in which Borderlands tries to be like other, better films and fails rather than finding its own voice derived from the games.

"The biggest problem with Eli Roth’s 'Borderlands' isn’t that it’s bad," says Bibbiani, "it’s that it’s not interesting enough to be bad. It’s mass-produced pabulum. All the edges have been sanded down so it can be safe and mainstream, but they went too far and there’s almost nothing left. It’s technically a movie based on 'Borderlands.' Not much else."

We'll see if Borderlands' box office numbers can hold up to its aspirations, but I think we all expect that it's not going to take off there either.

I hope that nobody is surprised by this reaction: That would mean they missed the copious quantities of people dunking on this movie after the first, then second, then final trailers debuted. A wacky big-budget adaptation of a videogame franchise being roundly panned is almost a fait accompli—especially one that has little to immediately recommend it aside from star power and budget.

"I really wanted to like it," said reporter Matthew Simpson (via GamesRadar), who went on to say that it had an "uninspired plot" and "several phoned in performances."

The Borderlands movie is an action comedy directed by Eli Roth, and stars people like Jack Black, Kevin hart, Ariana Greenblatt, Jamie Lee Curtis, Florian Munteanu, and Cate Blanchett as characters from the first game—Claptrap, Roland, Lilith, and the rest—going on an adventure to, of course, rob an ancient and secret vault of its copious treasures.

Cate Blanchett, notably, said she's probably only in this movie because of a "touch of covid madness" after being cooped up at home with nothing but gardening for too long.

Bitesize Break's Adriano Caporusso said that it "swaps the mayhem and imagination of the games for a lifeless, unfunny, and visually repulsive dud." 

More positive opinions came from people who were clearly genre or game fans predisposed to like Borderlands for its pedigree rather than as a standalone movie. They generally noted things like an "exceptional level of detail for those who have played the video games" or called the movie a "hell of a film" as "an addition to the Borderlands universe."

That probably bodes well for people who're excited about it as Borderlands fans, but not for its success with a more general audience. We'll see how it goes when the movie premiers in just a few days, on August 9. Until then, you can go crawling through #BorderlandsMovie on Twitter if you'd like to find more reactions in the wild.