With the Hunger Games series coming to a close this year, Lionsgate has naturally been on the prowl for source material to find something that can fill its schedule with multiple movies. Game series Borderlands, with its massive player audience, would seem to be a good choice.
Though video games don’t traditionally have the best luck on film, Lionsgate seems confident that Borderlands could be something different. Developed by Gearbox Software and published by Take-Two Interactive 2K Games subsidiary, the game series is a blend of first-person shooter and role-playing adventure offering the chance to play as one of four different characters, earning points for taking out various enemies on the planet Pandora, home to a wealth of mineral deposits, but also full of dangerous alien creatures.
Borderlands has a reputation for violence and madness, and it appears the studio wants to stick to that mantra. "The Borderlands games don't pull any punches, and we'll make the movie with the same in-your-face attitude that has made the series a blockbuster mega-franchise," Lionsgate co-chairs Rob Friedman and Patrick Wachsberger said in a statement, with the film set to be produced by** Spider-Man **stalwarts Avid and Ari Arad.
"Lionsgate really seems to get Borderlands," Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford said during a panel at PAX 2015 in Seattle. "And we're giving a mission to them, to make the first good movie based on a video game. And knowing Borderlands, it's probably going to be rated R." With development at an early stage, there’s no timeline yet for when the eventual film might arrive in cinemas. And, more importantly, will James Cameron try to nuke from orbit anyone who sets a movie on an celestial body called Pandora?