After over a decade of development, Gearbox CEO and Borderlands creator Randy Pitchford is celebrating a major milestone as the highly anticipated Borderlands movie prepares to blast onto the big screen this summer. Directed by Eli Roth and starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart, Cate Blanchett, and Jack Black, the August 9th release will bring the action-packed and humor-filled world of the popular shooter-looter franchise to a wider audience.
When Pitchford first began pursuing a Borderlands film adaptation in the early 2010s, Hollywood remained skeptical that a movie based on a video game could find mainstream success. “The expectation back then was you couldn’t do a video game movie and have it mean anything,” Pitchford told GamesRadar+. However, box office hits like Detective Pikachu, Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and the Assassin’s Creed film have helped transform perceptions.
Actress Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays Dr. Tannis in the Borderlands movie, understands the creative potential of interactive storytelling. “If video games are where art is taking us, that’s groovy,” she tells GamesBeat. As one of the industry’s biggest supporters of blending mediums, Curtis’ involvement underscores the film’s ambitions.
Bringing the sprawling world of Borderlands to the big screen presented immense challenges. But Pitchford remains optimistic that audiences will form deep connections with the Borderlands characters just as gamers have. With the potential to launch an entire cinematic universe, the movie’s box office success will further cement video game adaptations as a mainstream Hollywood genre.
Fans both old and new now eagerly await seeing how Pitchford and Roth’s vision translates the shooter-looter experience beloved by the games’ millions of players. As the years of perseverance culminate in the film’s theatrical debut, Gearbox’s ambitious Borderlands movie is set to blast open new frontiers for interactive entertainment.
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