Well, the Borderlands movie sure landed with a splat: Zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes to start the day Thursday.
The figure has since “improved” to 3%, now that the movie review aggregation site found one (1) critic willing to speak a word of charity for the otherwise ill-conceived adaptation of Gearbox Software’s loot-shooter franchise. But that review, from Beyond the Trailer, was more about Cate Blanchett, whose performance most other reviews praised even as they ripped the rest of the picture.
At any rate, it was a nice lull, thinking that video game adaptations had finally shed their past as buck-grabbing cringefests that comprised 10 times as much marketing as story. In 2018, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s adaptation of Rampage stunned the world with a 51% score on the Tomatometer, the first video game movie to get a majority of critics to say it was good.
Then, in 2019, Pokemon Detective Pikachu hit a whopping 68% on Rotten Tomatoes. 2020’s Sonic the Hedgehog was a very pleasant surprise at 64%, and its sequel tied Detective Pikachu’s 68% two years later, validating more than just fans of the Blue Blur.
Unfortunately, the genre backslid with Tom Holland in Uncharted the same year (only 40% “fresh”) but the trend looked good, and with The Last of Us and Fallout getting raves from the prestige-TV crowd, it felt like we were done with the days when a video game as a movie was implicitly schlock.
Are video game movies getting better, or worse?
Looks like we might be back to square one, if the subject is AAA tentpole games on a console, anyway. Remember, in 2016, Assassin’s Creed had Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, and Jeremy Irons — that’s five Oscar nominations and two wins among the three — and pooed the bed with an 18% rating on the ol’ Tomatometer. Then came Uncharted, and now this bomb.
Most of the reviews say Borderlands doesn’t even rise to the level of a popcorn flick — which is something that isn’t supposed to be a critic’s choice, but is at least a crowd-pleaser with some laughs and heavy action.
So the real verdict will be in the opening weekend gate, which will be counted on Sunday. Borderlands’ budget is estimated to be $100 million. It’ll probably need to make two or three times that to be considered a success by its own distributor.
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