The ‘Borderlands’ Movie Has A Release Date 9 Years After It Was Announced

While video game movies and TV shows have certainly gotten better in the age of Sonic the Hedgehog, The Last of Us and Cyberpunk Edgerunners, there are certainly major missteps still happening. While my favorite disaster in the last few years has been the Paramout+ Halo show, we may soon enough have another contender.

The Borderlands movie is made up of essentially nothing but red flags at this point. It now has a release date, August 9, 2024, but I think we need to take a look back here. A long, long look back. Here is everything that raises serious questions about this movie being in development hell for almost a decade:

• The Borderlands movie was first announced in August 2015, meaning it will end up taking exactly nine years to make it to theaters, if this is even the correct date in the end.
• Casting has been all over the place. Somehow the movie attracted two Oscar-winners, Cate Blanchett playing Lilith (good actor, bizarre casting) and Jamie Lee Curtis playing Tannis (better). Jack Black as Claptrap also seems good, but Kevin Hart as Roland, the beefy, stoic soldier, is one of the weirdest video game adaptation casting decisions I’ve ever seen.

• The game is said to not follow the source material, not adapting a storyline from any of the games and making up its own instead centered around Lilith and Tina. Randy Pitchford says it exists in parallel “Borderlands Cinematic Universe.”
• Recently, The Last of Us’ Craig Mazin removed his name as a writer from the project, seemingly replaced by an alias.
• In nine years we have not see a single character in costume. The closest we’ve gotten are blacked-out silhouettes and a leaked set shot of Blanchett with red hair. Given the unique visual style of Borderlands, one of the biggest questions is how this will translate to the screen. We have no idea, no images, no teasers, nothing, not even with this release date announcement.

At this point, alarm bells are going off all over the place about this project. It’s certainly possible to do a goofy, fun video game movie well, but the excruciatingly long production time, the weird casting, the deviance from the source material and the utter blackout of promotional materials projects little confidence. Then again, I suppose the Uncharted movie was in development hell for a decade and that was a box office hit in the end. But yeah, bit of a longshot for this one, I’d wager.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.