Everyone is holding their breath to see if the star-studded Borderlands movie directed by Eli Roth is actually going to be good or not, and while we’ve barely seen anything from it yet, we do have our first photo of Cate Blanchett as Lilith.
Well, sort of.
The photo is below, and was taken by Jaime Lee Curtis on set, who is playing Tannis. It shows Blanchett in silhouette, and while it doesn’t show anything past that, it’s clear that they are going for as much of a game-accurate look as possible, right down to the hair.
Casting for the film has sort of been all over the place. The early picks seemed a bit odd. Blanchett is older than Lilith appears to be in the games. No one saw the left turn pick of Kevin Hart as the stone serious super soldier Roland coming. But later picks started to make more sense, like Jack Black as Claptrap, Curtis as Tannis and Gina Gershon as Moxxi.
Curtis certainly seems excited about the production, and the general vibes on set have been good, from the coverage I’ve been following. Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford says he’s broken down in tears a few times while filming, not because of sad scenes but rather just the “joy and emotion” of what’s happening with the movie:
We have certainly arrived in a place where a video game movie adaptation certainly does not seem to be the death sentence for a poor quality feature that it once was. I would argue Sonic the Hedgehog started the trend, though we should give credit to Netflix’s Castlevania too. Also The Witcher, which yes, is based on the books, but still influenced by the games. Now we have other high profile projects coming like a Last of Us adaptation on HBO from the Craig Mazin, who wrote Chernobyl (and also this Borderlands script).
As for Borderlands? I have no idea. Borderlands, the games, have struggled to make their humor land as time has gone on, but they actually work best in their most dramatic moments, if you ask me. And it’s probably a good sign that everyone is having fun in the cast.
And it’s a huge cast, just check IMDB. It’s an amalgam of a few different storylines in the original universe, but doesn’t follow any one game exactly. It’s also missing a lot of core Vault Hunters (Brick, Mordecai, almost everyone from BL2 and 3) and its most famous villain, Handsome Jack, but I suppose you have to save something for potential sequels. And the cast is sprawling already.
Do I think this is going to be good? I’m kind of still in coinflip territory at the moment, but I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how it turns out, one way or another.
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