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Eli Roth is making a Borderlands movie

The director of Hostel brings you Pandora

An image of the two main villains from Borderlands 3 Gearbox Software/2K Games
Ryan Gilliam (he/him) has worked at Polygon for nearly seven years. He primarily spends his time writing guides for massively popular games like Diablo 4 & Destiny 2.

The Borderlands movie is officially happening, again. Lionsgate originally announced a feature film based on the Borderlands video game franchise in 2015, and the studio announced on Thursday via a press release that infamous horror director Eli Roth will helm the upcoming adaptation.

Roth — alongside producers Avi Arad (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse), Ari Arad, and Erik Feig — will helm the production using a new draft from writer Craig Mazin. Mazin recently won two Emmys for his work on HBO’s Chernobyl.

In a press release from Lionsgate, Roth has this to say about the project:

I’m so excited to dive into the world of Borderlands and I could not be doing it with a better script, producing team, and studio. I have a long, successful history with Lionsgate – I feel like we have grown up together and that everything in my directing career has led to a project of this scale and ambition.

I look forward to bringing my own energy, ideas, and vision to the wild, fun, and endlessly creative world of the game. Randy Pitchford and everyone at Gearbox have been incredibly supportive of my ideas – it really feels like a perfect storm of creators coming together. We are out to make a new classic, one which the fans of the game will love, but also one which will find new audiences globally.

Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford will also serve as an executive producer on the film, as well as Strauss Zelnick, chairman and CEO of Take-Two Interactive.

Pitchford helped launch Borderlands 3 last year, which we said felt like more of the same in our review. Roth’s most recent project was the “spoppy” The House with a Clock in Its Walls, which featured a haunting, animatronic Jack Black baby. But the director is best known for his gory horror movies, such as Hostel and The Green Inferno.

It’s currently unclear if the Borderlands movie will re-tell the tale from one of the Borderlands games, or tell a different story from the world of Pandora.

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