It’s no secret that Lionsgate and director Eli Roth’s “Borderlands” movie has been anything but a success in its early going. The video game adaptation has been met with near-universal negativity from critics and audiences alike. It’s a bad situation, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, things have gone from “very bad” to “much worse” as the film straight up collapsed in its second weekend at the box office. There is now zero hope for any sort of turnaround. Not that there was much before, but at this point, we’re now talking about the film entering all-time bomb territory, which is not something one should say lightly.
“Borderlands” fell off a cliff in weekend two, dropping all the way to number 10 on the charts with an estimated $2.35 million haul. That’s a shocking 73% drop compared to the film’s opening weekend. It also made for a truly lousy $752 per-screen average. “Alien: Romulus” debuted to $108 million globally, which sucked up a lot of oxygen and certainly didn’t help “Borderlands” any. Rest assured, theaters around the country will be giving many, many of these screens to other films by next weekend.
The impact of that 73% drop can’t be overstated. It certainly doesn’t help when your big-budget blockbuster opens to just $8.6 million in the first place, but still, this is one of the biggest drops ever for a movie that cost more than $100 million to make. We’ve seen bigger drops in the past, such as with 2009’s “Friday the 13th” remake, which dropped more than 80% on its second weekend. The difference is, that movie didn’t cost nearly as much to make and was still a hit in the end. Many of the other movies that have dropped harder in weekend two have similarly either cost far less or still did at least okay in the long run. “Borderlands” is both expensive and not connecting in any way with its intended audience. That’s a devastating combination.
Lots of people are going to lose lots of money on Borderlands
To date, the film has made only $18.5 million worldwide, including just $5 million overseas. The film carries a reported $115 million budget, which doesn’t account for marketing. Lionsgate isn’t on the hook for all of that money, as the studio sold a lot of the overseas rights to help cover costs. Even so, all of those foreign distributors can’t be happy right now, and Lionsgate is still going to lose a fortune. What’s worse is that Lionsgate is not nearly as big as Universal, Paramount, or Disney and is not as well equipped to handle such a big loss.
There are many reasons “Borderlands” failed so spectacularly at the box office, but it all comes back to the fact that it’s a movie almost nobody seems to like one bit. That means it’s going to have a tough time making up much revenue on VOD (or anywhere else, for that matter) since word of mouth is going to be exceptionally bad. It’s too early to even try and predict how much money the movie could lose, but it’s the kind of money that gets people fired.
Even looking at bombs of recent history, “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” is arguably one of the biggest flops in the realm of superhero cinema. It made just $134 million worldwide against a $125 million budget. It cost about as much as “Borderlands,” yet Eli Roth’s movie is going to make far less in the end. Even something like “The Marvels” barely cleared $200 million globally against a budget north of $200 million. That’s terrible, no doubt about it. But there’s still some value there after it left theaters.
It’s unquestionably worse for “Borderlands.” Just how bad things wind up? We’ll have to see. At this point, though, it seems fair to say that this will wind up as one of the biggest bombs of the modern era — if not of all time.
I spoke more about this on today’s episode of the /Film Daily podcast, which you can listen to below:
“Borderlands” is in theaters now.
