So that’s bad, yeah, but just how bad is it? With help from Google and The Numbers’ movie comparison feature, I can tell you this: It’s really bad.
I present to you…
An Incomplete List of Shitty Videogame Movies That Made More Money Than Borderlands
(in no particular order)
- Warcraft ($439 million)
- Max Payne ($88 million) Doom ($59 million)
- Street Fighter ($99 million)
- Assassin’s Creed ($241 million)
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time ($336 million)
- Hitman ($99 million)
- Mortal Kombat (but Mortal Kombat is actually good) ($122 million)
- Need for Speed ($194 million)
- Five Nights at Freddy’s ($297 million)
- Uncharted ($401 million)
One big-budget, big(ish)-cast Hollywood film Borderlands managed to beat, which I bring up only because I paid good money to see it in theaters and I’m still sore about the whole thing, is Wing Commander, an utterly execrable celluloid waste of time and effort that bumbled to $11.5 million globally. Frankly I’m surprised it did that well.
We can live in hope.
I’d like to think we’re turning a corner on this now - Lionsgate have taken a beating with both Borderlands and The Crow, which should make others think twice before just crapping out some half-baked adaptation, remake or franchise fodder. Disney have certainly learned their lesson, dialing back both Marvel and Star Wars releases to, hopefully, focus on quality not quantity. It’s clear that people just won’t turn out for more “content” and that they want to see something made by skilled creators who genuinely want to make the film or TV series, not some soulless corporate-mandated product. I’m confident that James Gunn’s approach at DC will also show the benefit of this approach (it’s basically just an extension of what he was doing in the MCU).
Almost everyone, including Kevin Feige, seems to have learnt the wrong lesson from the success of the MCU (that it’s all about the franchise and the IP) and it is now really starting to hurt their bottom line, which is the only stimulus they really understand. It’ll take a bit for the supertanker to course correct as it has a lot of momentum (so we will probably have to endure the seemingly endless Avatar films for a while) but it should lead to better blockbuster films and the cinemas being less carpet-bombed with franchise-fodder leaving room for lower budget films to have their chance to shine (and we’ve seen quite a few do very well recently which might encourage more studios to take a chance - your hit to miss ratio can be lower if you aren’t spending 100s of millions on a film).
How do you know all these names?
I don’t think any are that obscure.
Personally, I was burnt out of MCU stuff after Endgame, so quality vs quantity didn’t even enter my equation. It was just too much quantity, plus knowing how connected they’ve made these shows and movies ends up creating a bit of a mental barrier where I might be missing context (or getting spoilers) if I try to casually just pick one of the movies and watch it.
I did eventually watch Loki and it was pretty good quality IMO. Same with Wandavision and the what if series.
I’m still not in a rush to get caught up on the newer movies, though.