Eli Roth finally breaks down why Borderlands sucked

Talking to Variety, Roth points, not unfairly, to the absurdity of Eli Roth (You know? The Hostel guy?) making an adaptation of a gleefully violent, Mature-rated video game franchise, and then being asked to bring home something that would secure a more financially advantageous PG-13 rating. Without necessarily drubbing studio Lionsgate, Roth noted of the movie’s $120 million budget—an order of magnitude larger than the sums he typically works with—that, “As things grow bigger, studios just naturally become more risk averse,” noting that Eli Roth is really not a guy you should bet your bottom line on if risk-averse is what you’re after: “My nature as a filmmaker is to do the thing that’s left of center, because that’s what has worked for me.”

Highlighting the differences between Borderlands and Ice Cream Man, which he apparently self-financed for about $5.5 million through a mixture of pre-sales and tax credits, Roth says that Borderlands was ultimately wrecked by its efforts to make too many people happy, spurred on by a studio that needed all four quadrants to show up to justify its price tag. “You got something that belonged to nobody. It’s not a kids’ movie, but it’s trying to appeal to everybody.” (We would argue, by the way,  that it absolutely is a kids’ movie, whether Roth wanted it to be or not; the Jack Black-voiced robot pooping out bullets was the big, flashing clue.) “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. You just wind up with a movie that’s neither fish nor fowl.” Which, honestly, is a fair cop: Borderlands—unlike Ice Cream Man, regardless of how you feel about it—genuinely didn’t feel like an Eli Roth movie. And while that idea opens up a whole other can of qualitative worms, it does suggest there’s something better about making a huge, messy explosion that’s true to your own instincts instead of one that’s been slowly compromised to death.