Eli Roth to direct a Borderlands movie based on videogame franchise

The insane, berserker, Mad Max-ian chaos that is the Borderlands videogame franchise is coming to the big screen with Hostel and Cabin Fever director Eli Roth leading the charge.

Roth, who most recently directed The House with a Clock In Its Walls and Death Wish, will next helm a feature film Hollywood adaptation of Borderlands. Craig Mazin, the two-time Emmy-winning creator of HBO’s Chernobyl, will pen the script and filming will commence later this year.

“I’m so excited to dive into the world of Borderlands and I could not be doing it with a better script, producing team, and studio,” Roth said in a statement. “I have a long, successful history with Lionsgate — I feel like we have grown up together and that everything in my directing career has led to a project of this scale and ambition. I look forward to bringing my own energy, ideas, and vision to the wild, fun, and endlessly creative world of the game. Randy Pitchford and everyone at Gearbox have been incredibly supportive of my ideas — it really feels like a perfect storm of creators coming together. We are out to make a new classic, one which the fans of the game will love, but also one which will find new audiences globally.”

Released in 2009 from publishers 2K Games, the first Borderlands, a first-person role-playing shooter game, followed a group of “Vault Hunters” who battle the local wildlife and bandits of the planet Pandora to reach an alien valult before the head of a private, militarized corporation can acquire it. Borderlands 2, which sold more than 22 million units since dropping in 2012, saw the Hunters fighting Handsome Jack, leader of the Hyperion Corporation.

Borderlands 3 debuted last September and expanded the game’s worlds further with the story involving new villains The Children of the Vault, a fast-spreading cult. (Watch the trailer above.)

Randy Pitchford, an executive producer of the Borderlands games and the founder of Gearbox Software, the games’ developers, will executive produce the movie. Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, which owns 2K Games, will also executive produce.

Shepherds of the movie adaptation Avi Arad, Ari Arad, and Erik Feig will produce.

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