Borderlands director Eli Roth says the movie flopped because it "belonged to nobody"
Eli Roth blames the Borderlands movie’s failure on a studio push for a PG-13 rating that stripped the games’ violence. It made $33 million, holds a 10% on Rotten Tomatoes, and Roth says it pleased no one.
Eli Roth, who directed the Borderlands movie, says the film failed because studio demands left it “belonging to nobody.”
In a new Variety interview, Roth put the blame on executives who wanted the $120 million adaptation cut down to a PG-13 rating, which meant it couldn’t match the games’ extreme violence and irreverent humor.
The film grossed about $33 million worldwide and holds a 10% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s one of the more notorious video game movie flops.
What Eli Roth said went wrong
Roth’s argument is that the film tried to please everyone and reached no one.
“You got something that belonged to nobody,” he told Variety. “It’s not a kids’ movie, but it’s trying to appeal to everybody. It’s for gamers, but it doesn’t have the violence the gamers want because it can’t be that extreme because it costs too much.” He summed it up as a movie that was “neither fish nor fowl.”
He framed it as a studio-scale problem. As productions get bigger, he said, studios get more risk-averse, which pushed against his instinct to make things “left of center.” That mismatch, in his telling, is what hollowed the movie out.
Roth’s fix: leave the studio system
His response was to walk away from big-studio filmmaking entirely.
Roth founded his own company, The Horror Section, in 2025. Its first film, Ice Cream Man, is an ultraviolent horror movie financed independently, through foreign pre-sales and tax credits, and it’s being released with no rating at all, specifically to dodge the content negotiations that he says gutted Borderlands.
The through-line is control. Borderlands, by his account, was a film he barely recognized by the end. Ice Cream Man is one nobody got to water down.
Whether the PG-13 excuse holds up
Here’s the counterpoint, and it’s worth stating plainly.
Roth’s diagnosis is convenient. Blaming a rating puts the failure on studio suits rather than on the filmmaking, and not everyone’s buying it. As one critic bluntly put it, there’s nothing in the released Borderlands that even hints at a better movie hiding under an R-rating. The reviews didn’t describe a film held back by missing gore; they described one that was tonally lost, poorly paced, and uninterested in its own source material.
So both things can be true. The PG-13 mandate was a real creative compromise on a property built on R-rated chaos, and the movie also had problems a bloodier cut wouldn’t have fixed. Roth is right that a Borderlands film shouldn’t be PG-13. He’s on shakier ground implying that’s the only reason this one didn’t work.
The next big video game adaptation will face the same math: appeal wide enough to earn back a huge budget, stay true enough to not betray the fans.
Borderlands is the cautionary tale either way. It reached for everybody and, by its own director’s account, landed with nobody.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
VGC (August 4, 2026), verified for Roth’s Variety interview, the studio push for PG-13, the full “belonged to nobody / neither fish nor fowl” quote, the risk-averse and left-of-center comments, and Ice Cream Man being released unrated to avoid those issues
GamesRadar (August 4, 2026), verified for the 10% Rotten Tomatoes critics score, the $33 million worldwide gross, and the full Roth quote about violence and cost
PC Gamer (August 4, 2026), verified for the $120 million budget, the Lionsgate PG-13 demand, and the critical consensus that the film was widely disliked
World of Reel (August 5, 2026), verified for Roth saying he didn’t recognize the released cut as his own and the counterargument that nothing in the film suggests an R-rating would have saved it
Snipdaily (August 5, 2026), verified for The Horror Section’s 2025 founding, Ice Cream Man’s reported $5.5 million budget financed through foreign pre-sales and tax credits, and the studio’s release plans