The Borderlands movie could only manage a domestic opening weekend of $8.8 million.
As reported by trade publicationVariety, the film debuted at fourth place in the North American box office, doing far worse than the $50 million opening weekend achieved by last week’s other major release, romantic drama It Ends With Us.
It also placed well behind Deadpool & Wolverine (which is on its third weekend and earned $54.2 million), and Twisters (earning $15.4 million in its fourth weekend).
Variety also reports that the film did even worse internationally than domestically, bringing in a further $7.7 million for a global total of $16.5 million, which the publication describes as “embarrassing”.
The film’s production budget is roughly $115 million, with further marketing and distribution costs of $30 million.
Variety notes that nearly 60% of these costs were covered by international presales, but says the opening weekend is still “a disastrous result for the film, and one that was far behind already low pre-release expectations”.
Signs were not looking good for theBorderlandsmovie when earlysocial media impressions were negative, and subsequent full reviewswere almost entirely critical.
Further reading
After scoring 0% on review aggregator siteRotten Tomatoesafter its first 25 reviews, at the time of writing it now has around 100 reviews and a total score of 9%.
Vicky Jessop at theLondon Evening Standardgave the movie one star, writing: “Is Borderlands the worst film of the year? It’s definitely in contention – so laughably bad, in fact, that it feels like being catapulted back to a time when video game adaptations were a byword for mediocrity.”
