INDIANAPOLIS — "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," "The Last of Us," "Halo," "Fallout," "Twisted Metal" — the trend of adapting popular video games into TV shows and movies continues with "Borderlands."
Based on the video game series from Gearbox Software, "Borderlands" follows a bounty hunter who is sent to a planet to retrieve the daughter of the richest person in the galaxy.
"It's a big, fun, totally ridiculous, silly, good time at the movies," said director and co-writer Eli Roth ("Hostel," "Cabin Fever").
The sci-fi action comedy has an A-list ensemble cast:
- Two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett ("Blue Jasmine," "The Aviator")
- Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis ("Everything Everywhere All at Once," "Halloween")
- Kevin Hart ("Ride Along," "Central Intelligence")
- The voice of Jack Black ("School of Rock," "High Fidelity")
- Ariana Greenblatt ("Barbie," "Ahsoka")
- Edgar Ramirez ("The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story," "Carlos")
- Florian Munteanu ("Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings," "Creed II")
Roth previously worked with Blanchett and Black on a family scary movie called "The House with a Clock in Its Walls."
"Cate (Blanchett) was the first person I called. I was like, 'I've got this movie I'm doing. It's a crazy film, but it's like a space opera, spaghetti western, Italian sci-fi movie, but I want you to be like Clint Eastwood in 'Man with No Name' or Kurt Russell in 'Escape from New York,' and she goes, 'Oh, that's my favorite movie – 'Escape from New York,'" Roth said. "Then, I called Jack (Black), and I'm like, 'Dude, are we putting the band back together?' He's like, 'I'm in. I love Claptrap.'"
It'd be easy to assume there would be lots of violence and gore with Roth's name attached, but "Borderlands" is a PG-13 exception from his typically bloody filmography.
"The game is a very violent game, and we didn't want to make a very violent movie. We wanted to make a movie that was going to get kids 9, 10, 11 years old as well, so the whole family can go see it," Roth said. "I wanted to do something fun and the message of finding your family and becoming who you really are, there's just a lot of great things in it."
"Borderlands" is now in theaters.