Thanks to the variety of stories in the game series, Eli Roth's Borderlands film has the potential to spawn a great sci-fi action series.
Borderlands Movie Review: Is Eli Roth's Video Game Adaptation a Failure?
What’s the biggest hurdle for video game adaptations? Casting? Staying true to the original without being redundant? Having someone who understands the intricate details of the series’ lore? These are all tough hurdles to overcome. But most games, especially older ones, often suffer from a lack of stories to tell on the big screen. Given the ever-increasing size and cost of big-budget video games, that leaves a lot of waiting around or just plain improvising when it comes to adaptations.
Ideally, you want a game series that has an abundance of story opportunities without getting bogged down in a single set of characters or situations. Something that allows you to play fast and loose with plot details and chronology, but still connects with fans through the places and people of the franchise. The Borderlands series is one such example. In its 15 years of existence, it has rarely stuck to a single protagonist or story outside of the overarching struggle for power and vaults, and has enough flexibility to chop and change smaller aspects to suit.
Eli Roth’s Borderlands movie is clearly taking advantage of this. It pulls from aspects of the first three games and rewrites the story to include some popular characters from earlier in the chronology. So now we get fan favorites like Tiny Tina and Krieg instead of waiting.
