Things keep getting worse for Borderlands, which just suffered the worst second-week drop of any 2024 release. Borderlands opened in theaters on August 9, 2024, to abysmal reviews, resulting in a 9% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and a terrible D+ CinemaScore. Word of mouth about the movie quickly spread, and the film opened to a meager $8.6 million in its opening weekend, landing in the number four spot at the box office. Things only got worse as the film headed into weekend two.
Borderlands plummeted at the box office in its second weekend, grossing just $2.35 million in 3,125 theaters. ScreenRant reported that this is a 72% decline, making it the worst drop for a wide-release movie in 2024, beating out MaXXXine‘s 69.1% drop and The Bikerider‘s 65.9% drop. Those movies notably cost a fraction of what Borderlands did, and the video game adaptation had a worse second-weekend drop than other big-budget flops this year, such as Madame Web (61.4%) and Argylle (64.2 %).
Borderlands Bombs Hard
Borderlands’ current box office total is $13 million domestically and only $18 million worldwide. This is terrible news for a movie with a reported budget of at least $110 million. While Borderlands initially could claim it opened higher than Harold and the Purple Crayon, the other big flop of August at a $6 million opening weekend, that film had a better second-weekend hold as it only dropped 48.9%. Harold and the Purple Crayon‘s $15 million domestic and $20 million worldwide total might not look much more than Borderlands. Still, the Zachary Levi-led family comedy only had a budget of $40 million.
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Right now, Borderlands’ only saving grace is that reportedly nearly 60% of production costs were covered by international presales. Also, this second-weekend drop does not take into account limited release engagements or special re-releases, like Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, which did have an 83.5% drop in its second weekend following the May Fourth holiday. While it might soften the blow financially, the written record on Borderlands for the history books is all bad news.
Between the biggest second-weekend drop and landing the worst ever CinemaScore rating for a video game movie, Borderlands’ has been dealing with terrible headline after headline since it came out. While Madame Web and Argylle were the biggest bombs of 2024 in the early part of the year, Borderlands has now spared them from going down in the history books as the most disappointing box office run or critical reaction this year. Unless another high-profile film comes out and just sinks at the box office (Kraven the Hunter is still in play, and maybe The Crow), Borderlands seems to have walked away as the biggest bomb of 2024, an award nobody wanted to claim.
