Image credit: Lionsgate Films
Sure, TV seems to be doing a decent job of making video game adaptations that don’t utterly suck these days, but the movie world’s still waiting for its The Last of Us moment. Will it come in the form Gearbox’s soon-to-be-released Borderlands film? Probably not, but if it’s brightly coloured chaos you’re after, you can expect plenty of that judging by its newly released “final” trailer – which has been shared ahead of the movie’s August launch.
The Borderlands movie has, of course, been a long time coming; it was initially announced back in 2015, with Saw and Insidious co-creator Leigh Whannell at one point rumoured to be attached. Then, just as it looked like the project had been consigned to the celluloid graveyard, it unexpectedly resurfaced in February 2020, this time with Hostel director Eli Roth at the helm.
Since then, we’ve seen a succession of eyebrow raising casting announcements – with Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Gina Gershiwn, and Jack Black all signing on to star – alongside a bit of behind-the-scenes shuffling, as new scriptwriters came onboard and Eli Roth briefly stepped aside during reshoots.
And now, following a first Borderlands trailer in February, distributor Lionsgate has shared a “final” trailer ahead the movie’s launch. If you saw the first one, this latest will be distinctly familiar – the car-in-exploding-monster and pee-in-mouth sequences both return – but there’s a little bit of new stuff too.
The Borderlands movie – which Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford has, perhaps prematurely, called the start of a “Borderlands Cinematic Universe” – sees Blanchett’s infamous outlaw Lillith returning to the planet Pandora in search of a missing girl. Along the way she teams up with former mercenary Roland (Kevin Hart), pre-teen demolitionist Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), her protector Krieg (Florian Munteanu), Padorian archeologist Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), and robot Claptrap (Jack Black), uncovering an “unimaginable power”.
And if that sounds like it might be an entertaining way to spend 100 minutes, the Borderlands movie hits cinemas on 9th August this year.
