Years after Lionsgate first announced that it planned to adapt Gearbox Software’s Borderlands video game franchise into a live-action movie, the studio has finally announced the creative team who’ll bring the story to life.
Eli Roth (of the Hostel movies fame) is set to direct a Borderlands film based on Craig Mazin’s (Chernobyl) screenplay. Gearbox Software founder Randy Pitchford will co-executive produce the film alongside Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick. In a press release, Roth emphasized that collaborating with Gearbox was one of the highlights of the project.
“Randy Pitchford and everyone at Gearbox have been incredibly supportive of my ideas—it really feels like a perfect storm of creators coming together,
he said. “We are out to make a new classic, one which the fans of the game will love, but also one which will find new audiences globally.”
Nathan Kahane, President of the Lionsgate Motion Picture Group added, “With Eli’s vision and Craig’s screenplay, we believe we have cracked the code on bringing the anarchic world of Borderlands to the big screen in a big way that will be a fresh, compelling and cinematic event for moviegoers and fans of the game.”
The original Borderlands game’s story about a quartet of Vault Hunters making their way across the wild world of Pandora in search of a legendary stash of alien technology sounds squarely within Roth’s general wheelhouse, and film studios really are getting quite good at turning video games into passable movies. What’s going to be interesting to see, though, is whether Roth and Lionsgate can manage to turn a relatively new IP built around a rather straightforward premise into a cinematic franchise that audiences will want to see.
No cast has been revealed as of yet but production on the movie is said to begin later this year. We’ll bring you more as we know it.
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