When Jamie Lee Curtis begged Jack Black to rescue her: “Where the fuck are you?”
Hollywood is full of disaster stories. Some are legendary, like Francis Ford Coppola’s long, expensive struggle to get Megalopolis made. The director poured millions of his own money into the project, only for it to flop horrendously…but at least that film was memorable. The movie we focus on today barely made a ripple, and yet Jack Black and his co-stars still went under.
Well, not Jack Black exactly. He seems to have a sixth sense about these things. His filmography is filled with iconic roles, but he also seems to know when to give something his all and when to just clock in. A movie like School of Rock radiates his passion and full-throttle energy. But with Borderlands, it’s clear he never truly cared.
The 2024 sci-fi comedy was adapted from a video game series – already, it doesn’t sound promising. Most of the time, game-to-film adaptations don’t work. The whole point of a game is that it’s interactive. You’re making the characters do what you wish. They’re not exactly all that fleshed out, and the developers aren’t often thinking about making a gripping plot that could easily translate to the screen.
On rare occasions, this idea works. The Last Of Us is arguably now better known as the hit TV show than as a game. The Lara Croft movies worked, but realistically only because of Angelina Jolie. But overwhelmingly, the genre is a long list of failures, from the laughable adaptation of Sonic the Hedgehog that forced them to fully reanimate the character, or the Street Fighter movie, which totally stank out the genre.
But this Jack Black flick fell even short of that. After splashing out around $110 to $120 million on an all-star cast and repeated chaos, directors and writers switching places due to Covid delays, Borderlands only brought in $33m at the box office, falling very much in the red.
Clearly, even on set, the cast knew the film was going to tank. Black seemed to know it in advance as he decided not to even go to the filming of it, instead simply recording his bits remotely to voice his character. Playing an animated robot called Claptrap, he figures there was no need at all for him to be there, so he skipped it.
For the rest of the cast, though, it was painful. It was so painful, in fact, that Jamie Lee Curtis, who was playing Patricia Tannis, hit Black up, begging him to appear even just to fix the energy on set.
“Where the fuck are you?” Black recalled Curtis asking him in a direct message, “We’re all here knee deep in the hellish shit, and I find out you are… wherever you are doing your recordings.” It was dire times on the set of a destined disaster. The ship was going down, and Curtis and the rest of the real-life cast were going down with it, while Black was safe from a distance thanks to the life raft of animation.
Did he go save them anyways? No, no, he did not.
“I love you, and I am there in spirit, and I will see you on the red carpet,” he sent back, then likely turned his phone off.
