Sounds Like Cate Blanchett Is Joining Eli Roth’s BORDERLANDS
Back in February, just before the shit really hit the fan, Lionsgate announced it was moving forward with a big-budget adaptation of the BORDERLANDS video game series, to be helmed by infamously restrained director Eli Roth (THE GREEN INFERNO, CABIN FEVER).
The announcement was accompanied by the same sort of screaming which tends to follow any video-game-movie news, but from where we were standing it sounded like a pretty good deal: BORDERLANDS is an ultraviolent, obnoxious, over-the-top spectacle of a video game franchise - who else would you want directing the thing? Eli Roth could knock this material out in his sleep.
Anyway, then the pandemic happened, and we completely forgot BORDERLANDS was happening until about fifteen minutes ago, when Variety broke the following news:
"It’s game on for Cate Blanchett. Sources tell Variety the Oscar-winning actress is in talks to star as Lilith in Lionsgate’s Borderlands, an adaptation of the popular video game. Lionsgate had no comment."
If your reaction to the above is, "Wow, Cate Blanchett and Eli Roth working together - never thought I'd see the day!", you have probably forgotten that the pair already did work together. Recently, in fact, in 2018's better-than-you'd-expect THE HOUSE WITH A CLOCK IN ITS WALLS. Blanchett must have enjoyed the experience enough to come back for whatever Roth's planning on BORDERLANDS, and we'd be lying if we said we weren't curious ourselves. We would also be lying if we pretended like we knew anything about Lilith, the BORDERLANDS character Blanchett is up for. Though the BMD staff has played bits and pieces of each BORDERLANDS title, the only elements that really made an impression were a wisecracking robot and the franchise's insane variety of guns.
So, we've got Eli Roth directing, Blanchett (probably) starring - what else can we tell you? Oh, the script was written by CHERNOBYL's Craig Mazin, currently hard at work scripting a LAST OF US series for HBO. This, too, is encouraging news! Of course there's no telling when BORDERLANDS will actually start filming, much less when we might actually get to see it, but we'll keep you updated on that front as further updates roll in.
Stay tuned.
