Eli Roth Blames Lionsgate for Borderlands, but When Does Eli Roth Start Blaming Eli Roth?

I remember Roth appearing on The Howard Stern Show in 2007 to promote Hostel: Part II. He didn’t just say he was proud of the movie.

Roth said its ending was:

“Unlike anything anyone has ever seen.”

He also claimed the ending was “better than any film this year” and said the sequel was better than the original.

That is one hell of a sales pitch.

I heard it and thought maybe this lunatic had actually pulled it off. Maybe I was about to see an ending so shocking that horror movies would need to be divided into two distinct periods: before Eli Roth and after Eli Roth.

So, call me a curious little kitten, I bought my ticket and saw it.

Unsurprisingly, it was absolute shit. Not slightly overhyped. Not merely disappointing compared to the expectations he had created. Just grade A, absolute shit.

That’s been the Eli Roth experience for most of his career. The sales pitch is always more exciting than the movie. He talks like he has discovered some new level of cinematic depravity the human nervous system may not be equipped to survive.

Then the movie arrives, and it’s usually a thin story, unlikable characters and gore desperately trying to substitute for tension. He sells himself like a dangerous filmmaker who Hollywood can barely control.

Most of the time, the only real danger is that I’m going to lose two hours of my life.

Cabin Fever established the formula. It has a memorable premise, but Roth fills the movie with characters I couldn’t wait to see die. That isn’t suspense. That’s pest control.

Then came Hostel. Wealthy people paying to torture kidnapped tourists is genuinely horrifying. Roth found a terrific horror engine and built the cinematic equivalent of a broken carnival ride around it.

Hostel: Part II was supposed to be bigger, better and armed with that allegedly unbelievable ending. Instead, it confirmed that Roth’s greatest talent may be describing the movie he intended to make.

Then we got The Green Inferno. Roth dragged a production into the Peruvian jungle and talked extensively about how difficult and extreme the experience had been.

All of that suffering resulted in a movie that committed the worst movie sin of all. It made cannibalism boring.

That takes an Eli Roth level of talent. Not the kind anyone should brag about, but talent nonetheless. Roth keeps mistaking disgust for fear. They aren’t the same thing.

Then there’s Knock Knock.

I’m giving that one a pass, but let’s be very clear about why: the involvement of Ana de Armas.

Ana de Armas could improve security-camera footage from a DMV waiting room. Her presence doesn’t transform Knock Knock into a well-directed psychological thriller. It simply means at least one perfect decision was made during production.

Keanu Reeves screaming about free pizza is also more entertaining than Roth probably intended.

So Knock Knock is excused. Not forgiven. Just excused.

Death Wish should’ve been impossible to make dull.

Bruce Willis plays a surgeon who becomes a vigilante after his family is attacked. Point Bruce Willis toward the bad guys and let the movie move. Roth turned it into a sluggish, lifeless remake that made Bruce Willis shooting criminals feel like paperwork.

Then he directed The House with a Clock in Its Walls, proving his problems weren’t solely caused by studios refusing to let him splash enough blood on the furniture. He could work with Jack Black and Cate Blanchett in a completely different genre and still produce something professionally assembled but absent of almost anything that made it feel alive.

And there’s the pattern. The genre changes. The rating changes. The budget changes.

The disappointment remains remarkably consistent.

I’ll give Roth credit for Thanksgiving.

It’s the only movie he has directed that I consider genuinely worthwhile, although Patrick Dempsey deserves a hell of a lot of the credit for saving it. Dempsey understands exactly what movie he’s in, plays everything at the right level and gives the whole thing a center Roth’s other movies usually lack.

The fact that Thanksgiving works also weakens Roth’s usual defense.

When the material, cast and tone line up correctly, he can make something entertaining. That means the rest of the filmography can’t simply be blamed on timid studios, bad timing or audiences who weren’t ready for his genius.

Sometimes he just makes shit.

A lot of times, actually.

Before Borderlands opened, Roth helped sell it as a wild, chaotic adaptation that captured the spirit of the games.

We know how that worked out.

The movie reportedly cost between $110 million and $120 million, went through rewrites and later had reshoots directed by Tim Miller while Roth was working on Thanksgiving. It ultimately made only about $33 million worldwide.

When Roth first addressed the disaster, he blamed the difficulty of preparing a production that size during COVID. He admitted:

“We got our asses handed to us a bit.”

He also revealed that he missed enough of the reshoots that he sat down to watch a movie carrying his name without knowing what was going to happen in it.

That is an absolutely astonishing admission from the credited director.

Roth sounded more willing then to accept the ugly part of taking studio money. As he put it:

“You took the money, you can take it on the chin.”

He understood that his name remained on the movie and he had to take the beating for it. That was at least a little honest.

Now the explanation has shifted toward Lionsgate’s demand for PG-13 accessibility and the endless notes that left the movie without a clear audience.

Again, Roth is probably right about that.

Borderlands should never have been transformed into a broad four-quadrant product designed to sell tickets to everyone from adult gamers to children who wandered into the wrong auditorium.

But studio notes didn’t force Roth to accept the job. They didn’t force him to direct a massive effects-heavy adaptation despite having no history suggesting he was the right filmmaker for it. They didn’t force him to help sell the movie before release as though all the doubters were about to be embarrassed.

And Lionsgate didn’t direct the rest of his filmography.

You can’t point at studio interference as the cause of every problem when the same problems keep following you from movie to movie.

Roth’s career is also littered with announced projects that sounded more interesting while he was talking about them than they probably would’ve been after he directed them.

He was once attached to direct Cell, based on the Stephen King novel. Roth eventually left after creative differences, and the film was later made without him and turned out terribly.

Would Roth’s version have been better? Maybe. Who knows? That isn’t the same thing as saying it would’ve been good.

He also spent years discussing Trailer Trash, an entire feature made up of fake exploitation trailers inspired by the Thanksgiving segment he created for Grindhouse.

He actively sold the hell out of it:

“I have a genius way to do it.”

He promised something “sophomoric and absurd and unbelievably violent” that would still form a coherent 90-minute movie. There it is again. He’s got a genius way to do it...

The movie never happened, thankfully.

Honestly, a movie consisting entirely of trailers might’ve been the perfect Eli Roth project. He could’ve spent ninety minutes selling movies without ever having to deliver one. He also announced a science-fiction project called Endangered Species that quietly disappeared.

Roth is one of the best at describing the movie that’s coming, and that’s where the problems usually begin.

The abandoned Roth project that hits closest to home for me is The Meg.

Steve Alten’s Meg books are one of my favorite series. I waited years to see that giant prehistoric bastard finally make it onto a movie screen, and I was disappointed by both movies we eventually got.

They watered down the books, stripped away much of what made them exciting and turned something that should’ve been terrifying into disposable Jason Statham monster-movie entertainment.

And yet, somehow, it could’ve been worse.

Roth was originally attached to direct The Meg. He wanted a more violent version but eventually left following creative and budget disagreements.

An R-rated adaptation with more horror sounds like the obvious approach until you remember that Eli Roth would’ve been the one directing it.

The books deserved more teeth, more terror and a filmmaker willing to embrace how vicious the material could be. They didn’t deserve two hours of Roth confusing gore with tension while every character behaved like they were begging to be eaten.

The finished Meg disappointed me. The sequel disappointed me again. I’m still grateful Roth never got his hook set into the franchise. We might not have gotten the adaptation I wanted, but at least we avoided watching him turn one of my favorite book series into Hostel with a shark.

Sometimes his best directorial decision is not directing the movie.

Lionsgate deserves plenty of blame for Borderlands.

The studio bought a violent property, hired a filmmaker known for violent movies and then became frightened by the violent movie it had ordered. It chased a wider audience until the finished product had no real audience at all.

Sure, that’s cowardly, committee-driven filmmaking.

But Roth doesn’t get to stand outside the wreckage pretending he was merely an innocent passenger. He directed the movie. He helped shape it. He promoted it. And he arrived at Borderlands with a filmography full of movies that had already promised far more than they delivered.

Roth has spent over twenty years talking like he’s a fearless horror visionary constantly being held back by studios, ratings boards and audiences who simply can’t handle what he’s cooking.

Maybe the uncomfortable truth is much simpler.

Maybe he’s just a fucking hack who couldn’t direct his way out of a bathroom stall, and now he’s blaming Lionsgate because somebody finally locked the door.