What would you make a core of a Borderlands movie for it not to suck as the recent one?
Making it 17+, changing cast and visuals don't count. Let's say it's live action with heavy CGI. What would be here for the main attraction, the plot, the cast of characters?
Well, first off, I'd make it a Space Western.
And inspirational.
I'd let Nathan Fillion star in it.
All jokes aside, Borderlands was perfectly fine as a video game. There was hardly a need for a movie and even if there was, I'd only have people associated who have more than the total average of hours into the game. If you haven't played The Pre-Sequel for more than 200 hours, you have no business here.
Mad Max meets Firefly, rated R
Do the borderlands comic series, but make it a TV show instead of a movie.
Also dump all the A-list celebrities. Nobody needs Cate Blanchett, Jack Black 🖕, or Kevin Hart in a series that already has established voices for their characters.
Why vitriol towards jack black more than the others? (Genuine question.)
People could say "oh change this or that" but this isn't just a bad borderlands movie, it's a really bad movie in general. It's college student level work(the college students are business majors) The whole concept failed from top to bottom.
Improving? Scrap the whole thing and start over. You end up with a better movie simply by rerolling the same odds.
Like the game, my movie would have 4 new vault hunters, with a supporting cast of returning characters. Perhaps each would have found a respective vault which lead to a piece of a key which they all need to work together to combine and open the mega vault.
Lean a little less into humor, add a touch of seriousness, not cast little funny Kevin to play strong serious Roland.
And obviously set it up for a sequel and a prequel.
I was literally talking about this with my fiancee and I agree with you. The Borderlands movie should have been Borderlands 4 and been a direct continuation of the games, then the next game is just borderlands 5.
It would have been on theme for the franchise.
As soon as I saw Kevin Hart casted for Roland I knew it was a corporate cash grab. I liked his standup when I was like 12 but I honestly can't name an acting role I've liked him in.
Hire a director who has ever made a good movie before.
IMO the biggest failure of most video game movies is they try to translate the story or characters directly to film, ignoring the biggest part of games is player interaction. Make a film in that universe with an original story. Sure cameos are fine, or if you really want a main character from the game, don't just rehash events from the games.
That's not safe. Just with Hollywood stars, CEOs think the main drag is the cast of characters, and the content of the original. And since they don't play these games, they hardly get what makes people like them.
An anecdotal case: the Doom movie, a guilty pleasure of mine, where the only highlight is a scene of brutally shooting imps from the first person perspective for 2 minutes. In a 90 minutes movie, boggled down by pure boredom, somewhere in the end. That's when many people woke up in the cinema and started to cheer, because it was more DooM than anything else in this movie.
For me, it's not even a story (in Borderlands, lol), but catching the feeling people got from these games. In the first game, as per my OP, it was treasure hunting and greed in the middle of nowhere, accompanied by trash humor and stupid gore. Shooting shit from a wind generator while taking headshots with a non-credible sniper-scoped rocket revolver? Sign me in.
My movie (although, I like the idea of a TV series better) would focus on Handsome Jack and Angel.
We learn little bits of their story through recordings, side quests, and references across 4 games. Let's hear it from start to finish cinematically.
The game is already story driven so do a Fallout on it and make a tv show with each episode being a main quest line from the pov of vault hunters and Commandant Steel trying to get to the vault.
Hell, you could do S1 as everything up the the Rackhive, and the S2 opener as defeating the Rackhive and the rest working through to defeating the destroyer.
S3 and S4 can be a mashup of BL2 and the pre sequel
Then do a prequal spinoff show with the struggles of the vault construction by the Eridians from the Siren from BL3 pov.
Then have the DLCs as standalone films.
Buttstallion becomes the star of a g rated kids program about exploring Pandora.
Borderlands to me felt a lot more linear than Fallout. Especially this heavy focus on loot in BL makes it so bland. I'm surprised someone thought this would even be a good universe to tell another story in. The comic book esthetic is fun, but always keeps the emergence at bay.
I'd make it a TV series. If it's doing well for Fallout, it shouldn't be hard for Borderlands to be a show. Because with something as big as Borderlands, it's not a good idea to compact all of that into one entire film. It's got to be a chain of events in an episodic format.
I'd like to see the story of supporting characters from the first game and DLCs as the first entry. There are a lot of bounty hunters coming here, trying their best at finding the Vault on the planet with competing corporate entities, aliens, local bandit clans. These NPCs can tell a lot of stories of those who didn't make it in hilarious ways, or, on the other hand, did a thing we know only by little in-game clues. Something to vibe with a beggining of Zombieland movie, probably.
Idc just put OG claptrap in there
and ladders.
It would be fun to do a wonderlands movie instead. Call it bunkers and badasses and do a cute and violent short story.