The Borderlands movie had an ’embarrassing’ opening weekend
Domestic and international box office sales were “disastrous”, trade publication claims
The Borderlands movie could only manage a domestic opening weekend of $8.8 million.
As reported by trade publication Variety, 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 the Borderlands movie when early social media impressions were negative, and subsequent full reviews were almost entirely critical.
Further reading
The Borderlands movie currently has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 0%
After scoring 0% on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes after its first 25 reviews, at the time of writing it now has around 100 reviews and a total score of 9%.
Vicky Jessop at the London Evening Standard gave 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.”
