Borderlands GOTY News

It's pretty rare that I walk out of a movie theatre thinking "I truly just wasted 90+ minutes of my life watching that." Normally, I get something out of whatever it was I watched, be it joy or elation at best, perhaps anger or frustration at worst. Those negative feelings at least mean I'm feeling anything at all, they're feelings I can work with and talk about. But when I walked out of the Borderlands movie, I think all I felt was… apathy? A general sense of "what was the point"? Which is probably the most damning thing I could say about any piece of art, but calling the Borderlands movie 'art' is too generous.

A film adaptation of Borderlands has been in the works since 2015, and a decade later it's finally here. Who knows what the story was meant to be originally, but what we ended up with was this: Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a bounty talker who doesn't really seem to care about anyone or anything but making her next paycheck, is tasked by the head of a major corporation to rescue his daughter, Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt). Things don't exactly go to plan, and instead she sets off on a journey with Tina, alongside Roland (Kevin Hart), the mercenary that kidnapped Tina, Krieg (Florian Munteanu), a big hulk of a man that doesn't say much, Patricia Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis), a doctor obsessed with finding a legendary vault, and Claptrap (Jack Black), an annoying robot that makes too many insufferable jokes.

For the most part, that's a strong cast. Both Blanchett and Curtis are Oscar-winning actresses. You'd assume that prestige would seep through into the film. But as Borderland's lead, Blanchett's performance feels like one dampened by regret. She has previously explained that she picked up the role to save her from madness during COVID lockdown, but none of that energy can be seen in the finished product. Every single line seems underlined by the fact she's not really sure why she's there, and it kind of rubs off on everyone else too.

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The long-in-the-works Borderlands movie packs an impressive all-star main cast which includes Jack Black and Kevin Hart, but the biggest surprise was Cate Blanchett as the lead. How did that happen?

During an interview for Empire, the actress, who's done a bit of everything (including The Lord of the Rings and Marvel) over the years, revealed what really got her into Eli Roth's Borderlands, and the answer is a bit surprising.

"The crazy asks are usually the things I gravitate towards; the things I could never conceive of," she explained, potentially justifying why she's taken on lighter roles such as Thor: Ragnarok's Hela or The House with a Clock in its Walls' Florence Zimmerman. She continued: "I think there also may have been a little Covid madness — I was spending a lot of time in the garden, using the chainsaw a little too freely. My husband said, 'This film could save your life.'" Her answer is both funny and intriguing, and one has to wonder how much the Covid lockdown and all the following Hollywood slowdown really affected her.

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You know Embracer Group? That company that’s rather gotten a bad rap for selling off studios and laying lots of people off over the past year or so? Well, according to Saber Interactive founder Matthew Karch, we’ve all got the publisher wrong. It’s, er, not evil.

That company, regardless of what you think of it, has been in the news a lot over the past few years, often because it’s either been buying stuff up, or more recently, selling stuff off and laying lots of people off as part of a restructuring the CEO Lars Wingefors now says is done. One of the most recent instances of this was Embracer’s selling of Saber to Beacon Interactive, with the current head of the latter now having offered his views on the almighty embrace.

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Matthew Karch, a former member of Embracer’s leadership, said that he thinks people have been a bit too hard on the company and Wingefors, who he claims has been “very maligned”. Karch cites the CEO’s wealth and the fact Embracer’s share value has dropped a lot over the past year as the reasons he believes are behind this, adding: “I think it actually dropped more on a relative basis than almost anybody else primarily because [Embracer] seems to be a company these days that everyone likes to pick on.”

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Despite seemingly escaping the Embrace(r) of death through their sale to Take-Two at the end of last month, Gearbox Entertainment haven’t quite emerged unscathed. The studio has confirmed a number of layoffs shortly after the announcement of the sale, while clarifying that no positions related to the development of games were affected.

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Alongside announcing plans to buy Borderlands developers Gearbox from the collapsing wreckage of Embracer Group, Borderlands publishers Take-Two overnight casually mentioned that they are "in active development on next installment in Borderlands series". This isn't a formal announcement as much as a businessblast to hype shareholders, so it didn't have anything specific to say about what Gearbox are up to with their wildly popular and deeply unfunny looter shooter series. It had seemed curious that the much-delayed Borderlands movie was coming out five years after the latest main series game and with no new one in sight.

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