Borderlands movie early impressions are looking grim

Borderlands movie early impressions are starting to roll out, and things aren’t sounding great for the video game adaptation. The Borderlands movie releases in theaters in August 2024, but entertainment YouTuber Daniel Richtman spoke with several people who saw the film and summarized their reactions in a (paid) post on his Patreon.

In short, they aren’t good. Early viewers told Richtman the plot is chaotic and incoherent – which, to be fair, sounds a lot like Borderlands – and they also criticized the humor, or apparent lack of it. Richtman said the general impression was that the Borderlands movie is “unfunny” with shallow jokes and underdeveloped characters that it still expects you to care about. Depending on how charitable you feel toward Gearbox’s franchise, you could say that sounds a lot like Borderlands, too. Heck, the game's publisher even made a silly little promotional joke threatening you not to text a specific phone number.

That reaction was the general attitude to the news on Twitter, with most of the comments and reposts taking some form of “well it’s Borderlands lol.” Still, Borderlands 3 sold 18 million copies by the end of 2023, so there’s plenty of appetite for the series and its characteristic brand of humor. Whether what people like about it translates effectively from game to film remains to be seen, but it hasn’t stopped Borderlands creator Randy Pitchford from already dreaming up a Borderlands cinematic universe of some kind.

The Borderlands movie, starring Cate Blanchett, Jack Black, and Jamie Lee Curtis, releases in theaters on Aug. 9, 2024.