'Borderlands' Movie Opens To 0% Rotten Tomatoes Score, Critics Put It In Contention For 'Worst Video Game Movie Of All Time'

You'd have to be a really crummy movie to be worse than some infamous video game adaptations like Silent Hill: Retribution, House of the Dead and Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, but this may be the fate of the Borderlands movie, releasing tomorrow, if early reviews are to be believed.

The review embargo for the film lifted today, and it opened to a 0 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. That score has since lifted to 3 percent as more reviews have come in, but the people who have seen the film tend to agree it's pretty dire.

Among the eye-popping pans is Rolling Stone's review, which dubs it "an insult to gamers, movie lovers and carbon-based life forms," and The Daily Beast's, which calls it so "drearily routine and slapdash that even an A.I. would deem it too plagiaristic."

When audiences got their first look at Borderlands posters in February, most didn't have high hopes. The games were already well past their time in the cultural zeitgeist, and most felt their divisive sense of humor wouldn't translate well to the silver screen in the modern era. The castings of Kevin Hart and Jack Black didn't do much to improve their impression.

The film had a troubled development period. It was first helmed by Eli Roth when it was shot in 2021, but it went through two weeks of reshoots in 2023, helmed by Deadpool director Tim Miller. During this time, the script was altered by someone named "Joe Crombie," which may be a pseudonym for someone who didn't want their name attached to the project.

The early slew of reviews led to a cocktail of schadenfreude and morbid curiosity online about just how bad Borderlands could possibly be.

me after watching 2 minutes of the borderlands movie https://t.co/9Ej9wFpcp4 pic.twitter.com/HrSlK4Pi4q

— Aspekt (@tehemopenguin) August 7, 2024

Perhaps the negative reviews are a small blessing for Borderlands, because at least compared to Morbius, people are expressing that the negative reviews make them want to see it in a gawk-at-a-trainwreck sort of way. We're still unconvinced anyone saw Morbius despite all the memes.