Borderlands' messy in-between: How a crazy pitch became a video game megahit and movie

It's been a dozen years in the making and gone through nearly as many writers. Production survived a global pandemic and spanned the rise of the good video game movie. It's a flick packed with a star-studded and Oscar-winning cast, soaking in bombastic flair and enlivened by 3D-printed assets plucked straight from game art.

After all these years, the Borderlands movie is upon us, and with the help of director Eli Roth—and not a few quips from Jack Black as Claptrap—it seems to be a colorful adaptation that will both satisfy and entertain.

But that journey to this moment is two tales of the Borderlands that are also worth telling. How a relative gamble on a new type of video game led to a massive 85 million unit megahit. Why the movie spent so long in development. How a director famed for his crafty horror came to direct a sci-fi comedy. And what all of this—the games, the struggle, the movie—did to help define Gearbox Software as a new sort of video game and entertainment creator.

The movie: Cracking the code

By some accounts, work on the Borderlands movie has stretched on for about a dozen years.

Much of that early time—in fact, more than half of it—was spent noodling around with the script. Early work on the script started back in 2012, years before a writer was brought on to adapt the series. The challenge? How do you turn one of the best-selling video game franchises of all time—a massive open world with deep roots in procedural generation—into a linear, plot-driven, and non-interactive movie?

Gearbox Software founder and Borderlands creator Randy Pitchford said they explored a lot of approaches, trying to nail down the best fit.

“The first draft had totally different characters,” said Pitchford. “It only resembled the Borderlands universe by vibe. There was a different planet, different characters, different timeline, different stakes, different everything.”

The second draft didn’t quite work either, though Pitchford said he liked the story and some of the new characters so much that they were later written into Borderlands 3.

“At some point, we were beating the movie up with a great director friend, and he recommended that I talk to Craig Mazin and give him a shot at it,” Pitchford said. He and Randy Varnell, who headed up Gearbox’s narrative team at the time, went out to meet with Mazin and give him a complete franchise brief. Mazin had played the games, so he was familiar with the franchise, but they walked him through where the Borderlands games were headed in the future.

“It was like, ‘Here’s our future plans for the franchise, here’s what’s happening, here’s the characters,’ like as far out as we had already imagined and planned,” said Pitchford.

It was Mazin–the writer, producer and creator behind HBO hits Chernobyl and The Last of Us–who finally cracked the code to getting Borderlands to work as a film, according to Pitchford.

Without getting into specific plot details, Pitchford said Mazin came up with some new conceits that acted almost like a little magic trick for the film. Everything came together perfectly.

“A lot of it was that Craig played the games,” said producer Ari Arad. “He basically cherry-picked everybody he liked and came up with a story to include them, which I think is a great way to do it. Lead with what you love.”

Arad also produced the video game adaptation of Uncharted and is working on myriad other video game adaptations, including the much-anticipated Metal Gear Solid movie.

While the script eventually passed through a number of hands before Roth reworked it, Pitchford said that Mazin’s core concept remained at the heart of the story. Mazin isn’t credited for the final script, but Pitchford said that’s more about him not wanting to take credit for words that aren’t his.

“He did crack the fundamental story arc and some of the key things to do with the film,” said Pitchford. “But he’s humble, he has no ego, and he didn’t want to claim credit for all of the work Eli and company did.”

One of the ultimate decisions the team made was that the film would be part of a cinematic universe alongside the video game universe. There are similarities, but the films and games don’t necessarily have the same canon.

“It’s adapting the characters, the universe, the themes, and even the same plot points—but not the exact plot points, not the storylines,” said Pitchford. “If you've consumed the video games you already have that story, that experience, and so we want you to get something out of this movie, something that you couldn't possibly get in a video game. And if you see the movie, we don't want you to not go play the games because you think you’ve already experienced that storyline. They’re different.”

That decision was partly drawn from lessons learned watching how other major properties dealt with canonical splits. Pitchford pointed to things like The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones which either ran out of source material or got ahead of the release of source material while turning them into movies and television shows.

”They don't play nice with each other, and it's really helpful if we don't get in a world where movies are waiting on games to be made,” he said. That’s the approach the Marvel Cinematic Universe has taken to some degree, not binding itself to the storylines of the comic books and vice versa.

By 2019, with work on the script narrowing in on the right approach, Eli Roth was attached to direct.

Perhaps best known for his work on compelling, over-the-top splatter-horror films like Cabin Fever and Hostel, Roth also has shown a deft touch with humor, as in 2018’s The House with a Clock in Its Walls and 2023’s at times darkly humorous Thanksgiving.

“A lot of his horror has that. Cabin Fever is probably his broadest, and Thanksgiving was funny,” said Arad. “He is always about keeping the humor alive while keeping all of the other things alive, like the jeopardy and the danger.

“Eli read the script and was like, ‘I am the person to do this,’” Arad continued.

Roth said his films have a “sense of humor. They’re not bleak, you know? They might be brutal endurance tests, but they’re still funny.”

Digging a bit deeper, Roth talked about his love of Star Wars movies, the works of George Miller in the Mad Max films, and John Carpenter’s Escape from New York. Both of his favorite directors—Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi—have a history in horror as well.

“I always thought that horror directors make fantastic genre fantasy sci-fi directors because horror has a sense of anarchy, that spirit of punk rock,” said Roth. “It felt like you were in the hands of someone who was going to give the middle finger to the system a bit. They’re working within the system, but they’re doing the stuff that no one else has done.”

One of the things that drew Roth to the Borderlands film was how much the world was built out. It gave him a chance to try his hand at something as visually stunning as The Fifth Element or Starship Troopers. That’s in part why the film was shot in Budapest, Hungary using the same art department that worked on the Dune films.

With the script and director locked in, the casting was an ever-pressing need.

As Pitchford, Arad, and Roth tell it, it all started with Academy Award-winner Cate Blanchett.

“Cate and I had an amazing time working together on The House with a Clock in Its Walls,” Roth said. “She’s so funny in that movie. She got to do all of this stuff you’ve never seen Cate doing in other films, so she was the first person I called.” Roth envisioned her filling the role of Lilith as a sort-of Alien’s Ellen Ripley or Escape From New York’s Snake Plissken.

Roth said he pitched Borderlands to her as a fun, insane, visually spectacular movie like The Fifth Element or Barbarella, but with the sensibility and anarchy of Escape from New York—plus a character in the style of A Fistful of Dollars’ Man with No Name.

It turned out that Escape from New York is one of Blanchett’s favorite films, and she loved the idea of stepping into an off-the-wall genre movie.

With Blanchett on board, the next cast member was easy. Jack Black has always been vocal about his love of video games and is a particularly fervent fan of Borderlands, sneaking in some pre-release time with one of the games at an E3.

“Jack was so excited to play Claptrap,” Roth said. “He knew the game, he knew the character, and he loved it.”

In what may seem like an odd choice initially, the team cast famously funny Kevin Hart in the role of Roland, a soldier who is essentially the straight man in the film.

“With Tiny Tina being batshit and Krieg out-of-control, you need to have Kevin in there going, ‘What’s going on here? Get it together, guys,’” said Pitchford.

Pitchford added that Hart took the role to prove he could be an action star. “Otherwise, we never in a million years could have gotten Kevin Hart to do this,” said Pitchford. ”He’s so big, and his box office pull is insane. He’s also a really good actor. He committed to it.”

“I was initially terrified of the idea,” said Arad, but he ended up “pleasantly surprised” by Hart’s performance.

Rounding out the lead cast are Jamie Lee Curtis (another Oscar winner), Ariana Greenblatt, Gina Gershon, and Florian Munteanu.

By 2020, Gearbox Studios and Lionsgate were ready to start talking a bit more about the soon-to-be-in-production film. They kicked off those conversations with a bit of subterfuge.

 

The games: The messy in-between

In the summer of 2007, Pitchford was just sorting out how best to describe the next big thing for Gearbox Software.

He was in Leipzig, Germany, one of many developers dazzling the gathered press with their games during the then-annual Leipzig Games Convention. It was the first time he was broadly showing off what he hoped would become a standout hit for the studio: Borderlands.

The presentation kicked off with a 10-minute monologue about the universe of Borderlands. Set in a time and place where corporations ruled everything, the story centered on a bit of alien tech that sparked a gold rush of sorts on a strange new planet.

This alien tech powered everything in Borderlands—but most importantly, it powered Digistruct, or the ability to deconstruct items and store them digitally, ensuring they take up very little space. It’s through Digistruct that players can have access to near-limitless weapons, a key component of Borderlands.

The idea of an infinity of different weapons was so important to the pitch that Gearbox set up the Borderlands demo to allow Pitchford to endlessly spawn randomized weapons around his character with the press of a button. It was the sort of feature that upended one of the core tenets of games with guns: limit the number of weapons to ten so each could be assigned to a button on the keyboard.

It was so well received that much of the early Borderlands press coverage spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the Diablo-esque nature of the game and its procedurally generated guns.

Now, nearly 20 years later, Pitchford reminds me of what else he told everyone during that early-days demo when he was (in his words) still sorting out how to explain the game to other people. Beyond the corporate-run universe and the mad rush to find a fabled Vault packed with alien tech on the planet Pandora, Pitchford also explained how Borderlands would present all of this in a compelling way.

“I was setting up this landscape where you have the most unbelievable technology that doesn't exist for us: The ability to have anything you want stored in a digital backpack so you can carry thousands of guns,” said Pitchford. “But meanwhile, it's this squalor, this dangerous wasteland. All these creatures had come out of hibernation that the settlers didn't even know existed—they were eating people and just, you know, making it difficult to live. So the corporations abandoned the search on Pandora.”

“I was painting this picture of everything in the universe living in this uncomfortable space between two things that should never be jammed together, like science fiction and western, or role-playing game and shooter,” he continued. “Even the characters live in the borderland between who they are and who they wish they were.”

The way Pitchford describes a borderland is by imagining the smooth asphalt of a highway that cuts through a prairie. There’s the space where the highway meets the prairie, made up of bits of broken asphalt with grass poking through. It’s neither road nor meadow, but it has elements of both.

“It’s like the messy in-between,” he said.

In retrospect, Pitchford acknowledged that he did spend a lot of time proving the endless nature of the loot in Borderlands, because as a rule, shooters never had that level of weapon diversity.

He also said he had paradoxical thoughts about Borderlands’ future at the time. On the one hand, he had to 100% believe that Borderlands was going to be worth it and everything would work out. On the other hand, he had to accept the cold, harsh truth that everything in the marketplace can kill your project and that no one will care.

“You have to live in this paradox between those two worlds,” he said. “The borderland between them.”

Of course, the game more than proved itself upon release in 2009. The franchise went on to spawn sequels, prequels, spin-offs, and new sorts of games entirely, eventually pushing Borderlands into the rarified air of all-time video game bestsellers, with numbers approaching 100 million copies sold.

And while Borderlands didn’t reshape Gearbox Software into a single-franchise studio, it did help it grow and expand its creative efforts.

“We were maybe pushing 100 people when we shipped the first Borderlands game. Maybe 120,” Pitchford said. “Now we’re pushing 1,000 people. So we have lots of things going on, and we also have the biggest team we’ve ever assembled working on, you know, what people expect we’re working on.”

But before the many successes of Borderlands could empower the growth of the studio—and add fuel to the sorts of creations it could work on—it had to kill some projects.

 

The Movie: Printing guns, playing games, shooting movies

Buzz for the Borderlands movie started gaining energy again in early 2020, thanks to a bit of Randy Pitchford showmanship. He and his crew snuck Eli Roth into their panel room at PAX East. The idea was to announce his involvement as director for the film, which was finally teetering on the edge of production after nearly eight years of development and pre-production.

“That was ground zero,” Pitchford said. “That’s before we went out to Budapest and started prepping for the movie.”

Pitchford traveled to Budapest early the next year to check out the locations where the film would be shot. He stayed in a hotel and was there for some of the early prep work before flying back home to Texas, getting his COVID vaccines, and then moving back to Budapest to live there during the filming of Borderlands.

He stayed in an apartment on Andrassy Avenue, famous for its high-end stores, amazing architecture, and central location. COVID was in full effect during Pitchford’s stay, and the city had curfews enforced by armed soldiers.

Segments of the film were shot in a studio where the team built certain interior sets, like Sanctuary City and Moxie’s Bar. Other sets, like Dr. Tannis’s lab, were constructed at a second studio. And there were quite a few outdoor scenes shot in the area.

“We were taking over quarries,” Pitchford said. “It was so interesting because the Halo television show was shooting at the same time and the Jack Ryan TV show too.”

It was a hectic city to shoot in.

“There were times when we would take over a quarry, dress it, shoot for a few days, and then rip everything out because the very next day, the Halo team was going in there to redress it for something,” said Pitchford.

Pitchford said he functioned as a sort of on-site Borderlands expert during filming, happy to help explain franchise lore, the look of the world, and whatever else happened to pop up.

“This manifested in a zillion ways during prep, like when we’re making decisions about the way the vehicles look and the art design and set design,” he said. “My technical title is executive producer because they help put the business together, but the actual value I brought on was in being a consultant.”

The help extended to the cast as well. For instance, Kristy Pitchford, who worked on the script with her husband Randy Pitchford, played through the Borderlands games with Blanchett to help her see every single scene where Lillith appeared. Randy Pitchford did the same with some of the other actors as well.

Coincidentally, Kristy—who wrote the early versions of Dr. Tannis for the Borderlands game—was on the same flight to Budapest as Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays the doctor in the movie. They spent the flight talking about the character.

Roth said Randy Pitchford initially planned to be on-set for about a week but decided to hang out and help all the way through.

“He was with me every step of the way,” Roth said. “So if I ever had a question about changing it too much to the point where it breaks the rules of the Borderlands universe, Randy would say, ‘No, no, that's all fair game. That's great. That's great.’”

He added that it helped that he and Pitchford have the same sense of humor and share similar influences.

Arad said Pitchford became a very close friend over the process of making the movie. “Gearbox mobilized to help us at every stage,” he said.

That extended beyond simply offering advice on lore, narrative, and characters. Because Gearbox used Unreal Engine for the game, they were able to share assets with the production team. Some of those assets were used to print 3D versions of the in-game weapons to be used as movie props. Others were used in the film itself.

“Props were hard for the film because so much of the game is procedurally generated,” Arad said. “It wasn’t like a traditional game where the assets are always just sitting around. But they made them for us, and we were 3D printing guns.”

The guns of the Borderlands film presented a unique challenge. Given the nature of weapons in the franchise, you can’t have two of the same gun, so the production crew had to pitch ideas to the game developers about what they were looking for, and the developers would come back with some options.

Gearbox also connected with the film’s VFX department to help create rendered pixels that were ultimately used in the movie.

“There are moments in the film where literally every pixel on the screen was rendered by Gearbox developers, which is pretty, pretty cool,” said Pitchford.

Another surprising way Gearbox’s work showed up directly in the film resulted from a bit of a lark. Pitchford brought his drones to Budapest because he thought it might be fun to fly them around. At one point, he started shooting some of the sequences with his drone just for fun. When he was done, he said he handed everything over to the editors, and they ended up using some of it in the film.

Principal photography for the Borderlands film wrapped in June of 2021, a moment commemorated online by a shot of Claptrap sitting in Pitchford’s producer chair on set.

 

The games: “The bit”

Borderlands empowered Gearbox, but Pitchford is reluctant to put too much weight on that single franchise’s success.

“We’re always evolving,” Pitchford said. “We’re always changing, but I don’t think Borderlands redefined Gearbox. I think what makes Gearbox, Gearbox, and what makes a Gearbox game a Gearbox game is a commitment to the bit, whatever the bit is.”

That full-throated commitment started back in the late ‘90s when the studio made Half-Life expansions and ports, and includes work on things like Tony Hawk, James Bond, and Halo.

“We’re not trying to make it about ourselves or trying to turn it into something that’s not literally full-on commitment to the project,” he said.

The result is a library of games that, at first glance, don’t look like they’re the product of the same studio.

“If you tried to look at just Borderlands alone and tried to imagine what other games were made by this developer? The art styles are going to be crazy, and there’s going to be a bunch of comedy and gags. But then you play Homeworld and it’s super realistic with a serious tone and a stoic style of storytelling.”

“That's what Gearbox is for us,” Pitchford continued. “At the end of the day, we're entertainers.” And as entertainers, the studio fully commits to the audience.

Standing in stark contrast to Borderlands, for instance, is the studio’s Brothers in Arms series, which hold deep meaning for Pitchford and the studio.

“Brothers in Arms was the first wholly original game and franchise that I created and directed. Everything else before that was an IP that other people had created before me.”

It was perhaps Brothers in Arms that suffered most because of Borderlands’ explosive success.

“It was painful that we had no choice but to effectively abandon our energies toward Brothers in Arms in order to successfully commit to Borderlands,” Pitchford said. “There were enough people that loved it and wanted more of it and we loved it and wanted to give more to it, but that didn’t change the fact that there are only so many hours in a day.”

It was at that moment, riding high on the success of Borderlands but forced to mothball or kill other projects, that Pitchford decided that he needed to build up the studio in a way that would allow it to both make new things and continue to work on games where people wanted more.

“The trade-off is too painful as both artists and entertainers,” he said, “and I think it’s painful for audiences too.”

Fortunately, the success of the first Brothers in Arms and then Borderlands meant Gearbox could grow, and the studio can now work on some of those projects that have been waiting for attention.

They also tweaked the way they thought about making games. The new approach leans into a “leadership cluster” which drives a project from cradle to grave.

“With this approach, we’re able to spin up multiple things, including a new Brothers in Arms game, which has been in development for a while—but we’re not yet ready to talk about it.”

When asked if Gearbox is working on the next mainline Borderlands, Pitchford said, “Of course we are.”

“There's a moment when we're ready, and we can and will announce something because that's the moment to make a public promise. We’re working on lots of Borderlands. We’re working on lots of Brothers in Arms. We’re working on every IP. I mean, we just launched Homeworld 3, and there’s still work going on there. And there’s Risk of Rain, and there’s Duke Nukem, [the movie] and there’s more.”

Among the more is Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, a game that exceeded all expectations in moving the Borderlands franchise into a world based on fantasy-themed tabletop role-playing games.

Speaking to the tabletop RPG board game Bunkers & Badasses, Pitchford said, “That deserves more attention, too. But us attempting something isn’t the same as saying, ‘OK, here’s a product we want to present to you and see if you’re interested’ because we’re not there yet.”

 

The movie: Kill your darlings

While production on the Borderlands film was relatively short, post-production once more saw the film’s creation slow to a crawl.

“It was a long post-process because we have the most in-demand cast in the world,” Roth said. “They all went on to other things, and every single production they were on had delays because of COVID.”

“First it was, ‘We’re going to finish in three weeks,’ then it was three months, and then it was another two months. The process of finishing the movie was so insane. I think none of us really anticipated how difficult this was going to be just in terms of the logistics of scheduling everybody.”

The reshoots were pushed so far back—to January of 2023—that Roth handed over that work to Deadpool director Tim Miller so Roth could continue his work on Thanksgiving.

The Borderlands film then went through a number of edits and reedits, working to cut the movie down to its sharpest take. The end result runs just over an hour and a half.
“The movie should be as long as it needs to be,” Arad said. “And it didn’t really feel like that story needed more, you know? Especially with comedy, you have to be really ruthless with edits.”

Pitchford, who reviewed all of the cuts of the film, felt the same way, which is why some of the cameos shot for the film didn’t make the cut—including his own.

The movie, as initially shot in Budapest, included a short scene featuring Crazy Earl, who Pitchford voices in the games.

“They thought it would be fun to put Crazy Earl in there, so I spent like five hours in the makeup chair being turned into Crazy Earl and I got to act. And it was good, but it needed to be cut,” said Pitchford.

Pitchford was the one who first suggested cutting the scene. “It was adding some cool flavor and backstory, and it was funny, but it wasn’t furthering the story,” he said.

The decision to call for its cut came shortly after he watched the Uncharted movie, another Arad-produced video game adaptation that Pitchford said he loved. There’s a scene in there with a short cameo of Nolan North, the voice behind Uncharted hero Nathan Drake.

He said the scene made him realize that creating cameos that bridge the gap between the video game and the movie doesn’t really serve a purpose.

“If you know that it was Nolan North who voices the character in the video game, it pulls you out of the movie universe,” Pitchford said. “If you don’t know who it is, it makes absolutely no sense. Either way, it disrupts the flow. So I called Ari, and I said, ‘I don’t think that scene works.’”

That’s the same reason they ended up pulling a scene that was to feature magician and actor Penn Jillette.

“We looked at it and decided it wasn’t servicing the rest of the story,” Arad said. “That’s always the hardest part with post-production, taking something that you like and cutting it because of how it fits into the whole experience.”

 

Time is the best critic

With the film in the can and set to release to audiences worldwide, Roth took a moment to reflect on the process of adapting Borderlands into a movie. While it was a 12-year journey, he was involved for less than half of that time. That said, Roth approached the adaptation from a pretty straightforward principle.

“As I told Ari and Randy Pitchford and everyone at the beginning, my job is to make an adaptation of the game—not a recreation of the game,” said Roth. “If you want the experience of playing the game, you play the game.”

In creating the film, Roth said he needed—and was given—the ability to tweak things to make them work better for the film.

“I needed to go deeper with the characters,” he said. “I needed to adjust certain things that work in the game but that I can’t see sustaining over a 90-minute movie. Randy was great; he said, ‘Make this the movie, don’t try to recreate the game.’”

That said, there were certain things from the game that Roth said he wanted to look exactly the same in the film.

“You’re going into a world you love and seeing it come to life, seeing actors walking around in that world,” he said. “Sanctuary City and Moxie’s Bar—I wanted them to look exactly like the game.”

The sets were also packed with Easter eggs, which show up in posters on the walls, in fliers, and even in the vandalism and graffiti. You might even catch a callout to Gearbox on a license plate, if you watch carefully.

In dressing the sets and creating locations that weren’t in the games, the filmmakers leaned into the aesthetics and backstories of Borderlands as well.

For instance, they had to figure out what the first settlements on Pandora looked like and how the planet looked after the corporations essentially strip-mined it and fled.

“They left their junk behind, and now people don't even know where this stuff came from,” said Pitchford. “Like, why is there a refrigerator that's up a telephone pole? Why does Marcus's bus look that way? That's the style and aesthetic of this planet, the way the rocks look, the landscape, the flora and the fauna, all of it.”

“It's dead on accurate, and for sure, the guns are identical to the way they are in the game.”

Pitchford is excited to see the reaction to the movie. He said he would be delighted if fans of the games liked the movie, of course, but the audience he’s most interested in is very specific.

“People like us play a lot of video games. We love them. We can't help it,” said Pitchford. “But not everybody in our lives plays video games like we do. They watch movies or have other experiences. And so, for me, the coolest thing about this movie is it gives people who love Borderlands—that are spending time in the games—a chance to share Borderlands with people in their lives who aren't going to play the video games as much as them, or even at all.”

“That, to me, is the audience that I'm thinking about the most.”

Arad hopes that watching the film will inspire people to check out the games or even return to them.

“I went back to read the Dune books after I watched the movie because I wanted to know where those details came from,” he said. “A great adaptation can make you realize that all of this stuff was in that source.”

Arad hopes that the desire to return to video games will occur with both Borderlands and his other video game adaptations. “That’s actually my greatest hope. It’s one thing I really aim at in terms of why a game company should make a movie out of a game.”

From Roth’s perspective, it might be a while before he knows if what he helped create lives up to Borderlands’ deep fiction and passionate following.

“Time is the only critic that matters,” he said. “You need to look back 15 years later to see if your film is a classic or not, if it holds up. Ask a teenager if they’ve ever heard of it—and if they say no, then your film didn’t make it.”

Make sure to check out the library of Borderlands games now on the Epic Games Store.