The trailer was packed full of different video game characters and worlds but apparently it'll only feature 15 games, with each getting a new story for one episode. The list of games is: Armored Core, Concord, Crossfire, Dungeons & Dragons, Exodus, Honor of Kings, Mega Man, New World: Aeternum, Pac-Man, PlayStation, Sifu, Spelunky, The Outer Worlds, Unreal Tournament, and Warhammer 40K. 

It's a bit of an odd list as I'm not quite sure what the through-line is, other than the need for a bit more advertising. But even with the lack of a theme, the addition of PlayStation is an outlier, as instead of an actual game, it'll be "highlighting various PlayStation Studios beloved entities," according to a press release. I'm not sure what qualifies as an "entity," but if that means we get an Astro animated short, I'll be happy. 

I was thoroughly impressed with Love, Death + Robot's three seasons, and while there were a couple of misses most of the episodes hit. My personal favourite is still Season 1's Secret War, a short that I always thought would make for a stellar video game. So even if the list of games is an odd mix, I'm pretty confident in Blur Studio's ability to pull something great off. 

The teaser trailer that we saw at Opening Night Live did seem pretty spectacular, and it was cool to see how each world was animated slightly differently. But the one scene that has fans frothing at the mouth only lasted for a couple of seconds and seems to be Keanu Reeves piloting an Armored Core. 

It's not confirmed yet whether this is actually Reeves, and while the first few seconds of the shot at 0:52 doesn't really look like him, the character in question does appear to almost morph into a Reeves lookalike. Armored Core even tweeted an image that resembles Reeves more. 

Unfortunately, the anthology series premiers on December 10, 2024, so we'll have to wait a bit longer to get any kind of confirmation on whether Reeves is expanding his video game portfolio to more than just Cyberpunk 2077 or The Matrix Awakens. 

Other than Secret Level there were plenty of other exciting announcements, including more details on Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, a new standalone Dying Light game, and a meaty chunk of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6's campaign. 

The reason for that, of course, is that I'm far from the only person who thinks the film was bad. The whole world hates the film, to the point that it sat for a long time at 0% on Rotten Tomatoes before creeping up to its current 10%. The reviews are negative, folks. Negative and numerous. So numerous, in fact, that an enterprising musician by the name of Sad Alex has made a full-on, 3-minute song just from a small sample of them. 

Where to start? First, you have to compliment her creativity. This is probably the first piece of good art the Borderlands movie has been even tangentially responsible for, and it's a fantastic idea all by itself.

Second, it's bizarrely affecting? I'm not the only one welling up, right? Sad Alex sings about all the things you could do instead of watching Borderlands with emotion you usually reserve for singing about the end of a 15-year relationship or the death of a loved one. You could play this over footage of me looking lost and forlorn in a rainstorm and it'd all make perfect sense. I'd be tempted to add it to my Apple Music library if that didn't feel somehow deranged.

Anyway, score one for the Borderlands film: Something positive finally arose from it. You probably could have written a nice song without spending tens of millions of dollars on a dumpster fire of a film, of course, but that's life: You live and learn. 

I'd forgive you if you've never heard of this particular Sega Megadrive (or Genesis) classic—to catch you up, it was basically a fighting game where characters from all throughout time came together to beat the stuffing out of each other. You could play a caveman against a 1920s mobster, or a bounty hunter from the future against a ninja from the '90s. It was very much aping Mortal Kombat, outside of that twist—it had its own equivalent of fatalities, for example—but its weird roster and fun backdrops (each stage a different time period, naturally) gave it plenty of personality.

As spotted by The Hollywood Reporter, Derek Connolly has been invited to write a script for a film based on the game, to be produced by Skydance Media in collaboration with Sega. The pedigree here is a little mixed—Connolly co-wrote Kong: Skull Island, which I thought was very good fun, but also the Jurassic World movies, and he wrote one of the early versions of the pretty disastrous Rise of Skywalker. Skydance itself has worked on everything from Top Gun: Maverick and Annihilation to The Tomorrow War and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. So my professional opinion is that this movie might be good, or alternatively it might be bad.

It's certainly a pretty random property to resurrect at this point—the original game got a sequel in 1995, but apart from that I don't think there's been a peep from the series in nearly 30 years. You have to question how much brand recognition is left there, and I don't even know that there's much nostalgia out there for it, even if it still has a place in my heart.

But it does have a pretty fun and unique premise, which counts for a lot. The reason all those characters throughout time are together is because they've all been plucked from the moment just before their deaths by a god called the Eternal Champion. This being gives them the chance to battle for a second chance at life, an opportunity to achieve their potential greatness and change the course of history.

It's a set-up that fits right in with the modern movie studio obsession with superhero multiverses. You've got unlikely characters from wildly different worlds thrown together, each with their own weird quirks that are basically superpowers—you've got a magic-wielding alchemist from the 1600s, a cyborg kickboxer, a ninja assassin… I could go on. And I will—there's an Atlantean gladiator, a Russian acrobat, a mutant vampire…

Of course, projects like this go into production all the time and never actually emerge, so it's very possible this won't come to anything. Even if it does, videogame movies are still not in a great place overall, outside of Mario and Sonic. But I'm choosing to be cautiously optimistic about this one. Don't I deserve a movie catered exclusively to my specific childhood interests just like everyone else? And if you're curious to check the original game out for yourself, it's available on Steam for less than £1.

It's the latter that matters, of course. Hollywood wouldn't give a toss if everyone hated Borderlands and the cinema cash registers were ringing. Indeed this was the angle of attack chosen by Uwe Boll, who's presided over many terrible videogame movies but reckons this one is so bad everyone's now wishing he directed it. And now it looks like the writing's on the wall.

Borderlands will arrive on unspecified home streaming services on August 30, per the Hollywood Handle, 21 days after its August 9 premiere. Note that this doesn't mean it'll be free on Netflix, but is more likely to be available for rent or purchase on the likes of Prime Video (the distributor is Lionsgate, which has films available across various platforms).

The move indicates that Borderlands' various backers have given up on any significant returns from its cinema run, remarkably quickly, and are now looking to squeeze as much as they can out of it, Morbius-style, while people still might be interested in hate-watching the thing. The likelihood is that this is going to go down as a massive flop regardless, with a potential loss north of $100 million, and it's certainly going to have people looking at the viability of Borderlands as a wider franchise outside of the fourth mainline game in the series.

The only chink of light I can see anywhere for Borderlands is that the audience reviews on Rotten Tomatoes are very slightly better than those of the critics, averaging out at 53%. Whether that translates into any significant groundswell of support when it's on wider release seems doubtful, but stranger things have happened. As for Gearbox's Randy Pitchford, he's simply adopted the classic internet tactic of posting through the whole thing, somehow spinning the terrible reception to pretend he's "super flattered" about it all.

Boll posted an image on social media he's nicked from IGN, which says the film only made $8.8 million on its opening weekend, against a budget of $115 million. "Haha," writes Boll. "My movies were rated R and made more money than this. Now you wish I directed."

Let's put the last part aside for a moment: have Boll's movies really made more than $8.8 million? They have if you add a bunch of them together. Twitter user StopSkeletons replied to Boll with some of the stats: Boll's biggest success was House of the Dead, which opened to $5.5 million with a final gross of $13.8 million. Add the opening weekends from Alone in the Dark ($2.8 million) and Bloodrayne ($1.5 million) and you've got $9.8 million, albeit spread across three movies (Boll has of course directed many more).

Our man Uwe's response? The utterly absurd claim that his movies have been illegally downloaded 41 billion (yes, "billion" with a "b") times. The discourse does not elevate from there, with Boll wading in to other replies to call people nerds, idiot sandwiches, and of course the old classic "your mother". 

"Eli Roth/Uwe Boll boxing match, please," writes Naro Video. "Winner gets to direct the Zelda movie." My favourite reply, and presumably one of Boll's too because he reposted it, is that Simpsons meme about Martin dunking on Bart:

Boll isn't done, of course. He later reposted his original mockery, adding "But will the gamers contact the makers of Stride Gum and persuade them to give a free pack of gum to each person that signs the petition Eli Roth can no longer direct?"

If you're struggling to parse this, I got you: It's a reference to a campaign sponsored by Stride Gum way back in the 2000s, where the company offered a free packet of gum to everyone who signed a petition demanding that Boll stop directing terrible movies. As you can see it didn't work.

Finally, Boll's claim that "now you wish I directed." I can't find any reference to Boll ever being considered to direct the Borderlands movie, but Boll frequently puts himself forward for any and every project going: and is known for a long list of videogame adaptations. He may well have thrown his hat in the ring at some point, and was unceremoniously ignored.

Well… it's odd to find oneself feeling a bit bad for Eli Roth, but Uwe Boll really does inspire the strangest reactions. I haven't seen it and Borderlands may be a bit of a disaster but, in all fairness, I find it hard to imagine that it's worse than a Uwe Boll movie.

"Jonah [Jonathan Nolan] explicitly told me, use the game as a reference," Harvey told PC Gamer. Nolan wanted his team to "lean into the world for what it is, and take the elements from that world," but also use their own imagination and creativity, Harvey said. "Don't carbon copy anything," Nolan told him.

According to Harvey, a fun opportunity presented itself during shooting when costume designer Amy Wescott "dressed this [actor] like somebody right out of the game."

"So I took that character and that likeness and literally made it one of the characters from the game, and I figured, you know what? It was such a [minor] character. Nobody's ever going to catch it," he said.

Harvey's make-up based homage to the games was so subtle even the show's crew, including Nolan himself—a self-proclaimed Fallout fanatic—didn't notice it. Eagle-eyed fans, though? They didn't miss a thing.

"[Nolan] didn't catch it. The writers didn't catch it. But boy, Reddit caught it, and they went wild for it. They went nuts over it, and they're like, 'We know exactly who that character is. We can tell you what game, what map, and what that person was.'"

The person in question is a wandering arms dealer from Fallout 4 named Cricket who occasionally stops outside Diamond City and Vault 81. Personally I'm not sure if I even remember Cricket from the game, because who remembers a minor character you buy junk from one or twice?

Die-hard Fallout fans, that's who. In the show the character's name is Rink, and she's in a single scene that's about two minutes long, during which she maybe has ten seconds of total screen time. That was plenty for Reddit's eagle-eyed Fallout community.

In episode 5, Max and Lucy have teamed up and are about to cross a bridge when they spot two survivors heading across the same bridge in the opposite direction. Lucy and Max attempt to avoid a violent confrontation, but this is Fallout—sometimes no matter how high your speech score is, you just can't stop the bullets from flying.

If you look below at a few images of Rink from the show compared to Cricket from Fallout 4, you can definitely see that they're the same person: her wardrobe, her gaunt appearance, the redness under her eyes, right down to the faint scar across her eyebrow. 

No doubt. She may be called Rink on the show, but that's definitely Cricket.

"That was my one little easter egg that I was hoping nobody would catch right away," Harvey said. "They jumped on that so fast. So, kudos to the level and the depth that these fans will go."

As per GamesIndustry.biz, the global box office numbers are out and, oof, they aren't looking that much better. The grand gross (as in gross income, I'm not just being extra mean) of the Borderlands movie? $16.5 million.

As an exercise, let's do some quick, ad-hoc maths on how much money Lionsgate needs to make to even start breaking even. The movie cost $145 million to make if you squish those production and marketing/distribution values together. The studio claims that 60% of production costs—that's $69 million—were covered by presales. Slap the $16.5 million on top of that, and you get $85.5 million. There's a remaining dent of $59.5 million to find the dough for.

Except it's even worse than that. Box office numbers are taken before a movie theatre gets its money, a cut that can be anywhere from 20%-50% depending on a number of factors including the theatre and the studio's pull over it (large productions will often see the studio raking in more, smaller theatres will often get worse deals, and so on).

The exact number landing in the studio's pocket is hard to call, but you can reasonably say that Lionsgate is (in the most optimistic scenario) seeing about two thirds of it.

In terms of how that'll impact the actual Borderlands franchise? Luckily for Gearbox and Take-Two Interactive, not at all. In an interview with IGN, Take-Two's CEO—who wants us to give the movie a chance—emphasised that "the performance of the film wouldn't have a financial impact on us or on the franchise one way or another."

Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford, who has been severely posting through it, doubly confirms this on Twitter: "Whatever was spent on the movie came from the movie studio, Lionsgate," Pitchford writes, before launching into the following spiel:

"We're working on our games and are pretty happy that there's a whole lot of people who now know about Borderlands that didn't know about it before. I'm stoked you think we do better with our games than what some of the best actors and filmmakers on the planet did with the movie—that's super flattering! You did see the movie, right?"

In fairness to Pitchford, it's likely many of those dunking on it didn't see the movie, statistically speaking. PC Gamer's news writer Joshua Wolens did, though, and he didn't like it—though it seems his "disconcerting impression it could end up a (relative) box office success" has not materialised.

It's hard to take anything good from that outcome, but Gearbox founder Randy Pitchford has found an upside.

"So what you're saying is: You like what my friends and I do with our Borderlands videogames even more than you like what some of the biggest and best cast and crew of film makers on the planet have done," Pitchford tweeted over the weekend. "I'm super flattered! We're working extra hard four you on what's next."

(I assume that "four" is not a misspelling but rather a bit of wordplay teasing the all-but-confirmed Borderlands 4.)

He repeated the sentiment in a reply-tweet a little later: "I'm actually pretty fucking flattered that people are essentially saying that my team and I are doing a better job building characters and telling stories and making entertainment than this un-fucking-believable cast and crew of some of the biggest and best film makers on the planet. I am super happy to live in that world."

And once more, with feeling:

That's definitely one way to look at it, and while it's not a perspective I would've considered, I have to admit there's some validity to it, if you're willing to squint and tilt your head a bit. Film and games are very different forms of media, and what works for one isn't necessarily going to translate well to the other. The plethora of bad game-based movies is ample evidence of that: A paper-thin excuse to mindlessly blow shit up can work very well for a videogame (see: Borderlands), but it's probably not going to hold up for a couple hours on the big screen (see: Borderlands).

Now, does Pitchford's statement hold water as a defense of the Borderlands movie? Absolutely not. Director Eli Roth said he was inspired to make the film by watching his dog take a dump (nope, not making that up) and I think the results aptly reflect the truth of that tale. It's just a straight-up shitty movie, and there are probably lots of things that people like better: Watching a dog drop a healthy three-coiler on the neighbor's lawn, for instance.

Pitchford rejected suggestions that an R rating, which is more typical of Roth's work, rather than the PG-13 the film ultimately got, would've made any difference.

"I love some gore in the games—I actively work on that!" he tweeted. "But I cannot figure out what mind needs that in order to parse a story as 'good' as if it’s not possible to be 'good' unless there’s a dick or an organ coming out of a body from violence or a bunch of 'fucks' uttered. It’s kind of an absurd argument to me."

At the same time, he seemed to acknowledge in another tweet that the movie was not quite as good as it could have been, because scenes that would've provided proper insight into characterization and motivations ended up on the cutting room floor. "They were great scenes, but I think in post with editors, producers and directors they felt the pace needed to stay quick," Pitchford wrote in response to a user who said the film's characters lacked the depth of those in the games.

"I hope some of the deleted scenes can come out at some point. I think, over all, the decisions were correct given what they had to work with. But it’s interesting to note that there was intention in the script and with what was shot to do what your instincts suggested would’ve been nice to have. Film making is crazy."

So, does that mean we've maybe got a Pitchford Cut to look forward to? Probably not. Echoing comments made by Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick last week, Pitchford said any financial losses on the film would be incurred by the movie studio, not Gearbox: "So I’m not really affected by that, except that if the studio loses money it may not want to make another movie."

Dare to dream and all that, but given the inevitability of second-weekend ticket sales dropoff, I'd guess the odds of Borderlands 2 are not great. Probably for the best.

Ella Purnell, who played Vault Dweller Lucy, wound up being a major makeup challenge, too—just not for the reasons you might think.

"The one thing that a lot of people don't know unless you've done a lot of research on Ella Purnell, she's covered in tattoos. Head to toe, covered in tattoos, " Harvey told PC Gamer. "And for pretty much all of episode one, she's running around in a wedding dress."

Since Purnell's character was raised in an idyllic Vault, it wouldn't make sense for her to have tattoos, "So every day for at least a month, I'm sitting there covering tattoos," Harvey said. "Even down to when she's exiting the super duper Mart, anytime her vault suit is down, I'm covering tattoos."

But that wasn't the only tricky element of Harvey's job. Something else became "part of the biggest challenge" of handling Purnell's makeup: her index finger.

Sorry for the spoilers if you haven't seen it yet, but in one episode of Fallout, Lucy bites off The Ghoul's finger. The Ghoul being The Ghoul, he immediately cuts off Lucy's finger to replace his missing one. Not long after, a Mister Handy robot replaces Lucy's finger with a spare he's got in a drawer. Lucy's finger problem was solved, but the makeup department's was just beginning.

Since Lucy's replacement finger is considerably paler than her skin (it's a corpse's finger, after all) and there's a seam where it was basically welded to her stump, anytime Purnell's hand was seen from then on in the show it needed to look like she had a weird dead finger attached to her, for continuity's sake. This isn't as easy as it sounds.

"It was such a chore, every day, I had to paint her finger," he said. And not just once a day, Harvey said. Continuously throughout the day's shooting he basically had to babysit her hand. "She'd pick up something, she'd put it in her pocket. She'd go wash her hands. Oop, gotta paint her finger [again].

"And the writers promised me, 'Oh, by episode four, we're gonna write something, that [the finger] heals, and you'll never see it again.' I'm like, 'Great, thank you!'"

The writers never came through, however, and Harvey had to continue keeping tabs on Ella Purnell's finger and touch it up constantly. That chore will apparently continue when Fallout returns. "You will see that finger in season two," Harvey said.

Worth it? Well, Fallout is nominated for 16 Emmys, two of them for makeup: both for outstanding prosthetic and non-prosthetic makeup. So, yeah. Probably worth it. 

Kingmakers is a game with a simple premise: What if you could travel back to medieval times with an M4 tank to give the primitive screwheads what-for? It looks like it might be fun, although it doesn't yet have a release date. What it does have, however—and somewhat bafflingly—is a movie deal.

The planned big-screen adaptation is being handled by Story Kitchen, a name that may ring a bell: It's one of the companies behind the Sonic the Hedgehog movies, and has also announced plans to make movies out of Dredge and Sifu, a Disco Elysium television series, and animated series based on Vampire Survivors and Tomb Raider. It holds the rights to many other game properties, according to its website, including It Takes Two, Just Cause, My Friend Pedro, and Slime Rancher.

"The action, world-building, and intriguing sci-fi of Kingmakers make it a perfect concoction to build a propulsive new franchise in Hollywood," Dmitri M. Johnson of Story Kitchen said.

Okay, sure, but that's a lot of weight to put on a game that looks like a playable version of those YouTube videos that pit one Terminator against a million zombies. The Steam page focuses primarily on Kingmakers' combat simulation and doesn't really get into the narrative at all, except to say that you're going back 500 years "to change the course of a bloody war and maybe, if you’re lucky, stave off the apocalypse."

On the other hand, you don't necessarily need George R.R. Martin on the script for this sort of thing to work. Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann was based entirely on the premise, "What if a guy went back in time on a dirtbike?" Army of Darkness rolled with little more than "What if a guy went back in time with a shotgun?" Perhaps the most on-point example is the 1980 cinematic classic The Final Countdown, starring Kirk Douglas, Martin Sheen, Charles Durning, and Katharine Ross, which asked, "What if a guy went back in time with a nuclear-powered US aircraft carrier?"

That's not to say that Kingmakers is likely to make for a good movie. We don't even know if it's going to make for a good game at this point. But at least there's plenty of pre-existing material to take inspiration from.

Kingmakers—the game, not the movie—is slated to be out sometime later this year.