Despite all of Hollywood coming to a standstill due to the coronavirus pandemic, pre-production continues on the Borderlands movie. We found out a few months ago that Eli Roth of Hostel fame is going to be director, and now we’ve just found out that Cate Blanchett is playing Lilith.
Variety first broke the news that Lionsgate Pictures was in talks with Blanchett to play the most famous Siren in the Borderlands universe, and then Lionsgate later confirmed the news with a tweet. The Oscar-winning actress who played Hela in Thor: Ragnarok is confirmed to play Lilith in Borderlands.
While this is great news and we love Blanchett in every movie she’s ever been in, the true story was buried halfway down in Variety’s reporting. A new draft of the screenplay has been written by Craig Mazin, the same guy that won an Emmy award for writing Chernobyl. He’s also the guy that HBO tapped to write the TV adaptation of The Last Of Us.
Hopefully, this means that the awful plot synopsis we got a year ago has been completely shredded in favor of something that looks like an actual Borderlands game and not the plot to literally every bad action sci-fi film ever made. Sure, Lilith might have an Australian accent now, but you know what? Small price to pay for a quality script.
This is also the second time that Roth and Blanchett will be working together on a film, with the first being The House with a Clock in Its Walls. Roth was all praise for Blanchett in a statement released after she was fired.
“I’m so lucky to have the amazing Cate Blanchett starring in Borderlands,” Roth said. “We had the most incredible collaboration together on The House with a Clock in Its Walls, and I believe there’s nothing she can’t do. From drama to comedy and now action, Cate makes every scene sing.”
Filming for Borderlands is supposed to begin later this year, but that’ll depend on a lot of things out of Hollywood’s control. Still, this is good news all around, even if theatres never re-open and we have to see this movie on Netflix.
Source: Variety, Twitter
