As production continues on Eli Roth’s Borderlands adaptation, Golden Globe nominee Edgar Ramirez (The Undoing) has officially signed on to join the star-studded cast of upcoming film adaptation in the role of Atlas, who is being described as a business titan and arms manufacturer and is also the most powerful person in the universe. Though not technically a character from the video game franchise, Atlas doe have a basis in the source material as a weapons manufacturing corporation, who in the first game hired privately-funded paramilitary forces to search for an advance alien technology in the distant planet of Pandora.
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In addition to this major cast addition, Lionsgate has finally released the film’s official synopsis, teasing a group of unlikely heroes who were enlisted for a retrieval mission. The synopsis which you can check out below also revealed character details for Cate Blanchett’s Lilith and Kevin Hart’s Roland.
Lilith (Blanchett), an infamous outlaw with a mysterious past, reluctantly returns to her home planet of Pandora to find the missing daughter of the universe’s most powerful S.O.B., Atlas (Ramirez). Lilith forms an alliance with an unexpected team – Roland (Hart), a former elite mercenary, now desperate for redemption; Tiny Tina (Greenblatt), a feral pre-teen demolitionist; Krieg (Munteanu), Tina’s musclebound, rhetorically challenged protector; Tannis (Curtis), the scientist with a tenuous grip on sanity; and Claptrap (Black), a persistently wiseass robot. These unlikely heroes must battle alien monsters and dangerous bandits to find and protect the missing girl, who may hold the key to unimaginable power. The fate of the universe could be in their hands – but they’ll be fighting for something more: each other.
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Based on the bestselling PC and console gaming experience from developer Gearbox Software and publisher 2K, a wholly owned label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., the film will center around a group called Vault Hunters led by Lilith and Roland, who must travel to the distant planet of Pandora in order to retrieve an advance alien vault before it falls into the hands of the Atlas Corporation.
The ensemble roster for Borderlands, based on the bestselling PC and console game franchise from developer Gearbox Software and publisher 2K Games, will be led by Oscar winner Cate Blanchett as Lilith, Kevin Hart as Roland, Jamie Lee Curtis as Tannis, Jack Black as Claptrap, Ariana Greenblatt as Tiny Tina, Florian Munteanu as Krieg and Haley Bennett in an unknown new role for the series.
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Borderlands will be directed by Eli Roth from a script written by Craig Mazin. Avi Arad and Ari Arad are producing through their Arad Productions banner, and Erik Feig, through PICTURESTART. The film is executive produced by Randy Pitchford, executive producer of the Borderlands video game franchise and founder of the Gearbox Entertainment Company, and Strauss Zelnick, chairman and CEO of Take-Two Interactive. Lionsgate’s James Myers and Aaron Edmonds are overseeing the project along with Arad’s Emmy Yu and Picturestart’s Lucy Kitada and Royce Reeves-Darby.
The title is one of the world’s most successful video game franchises, with more than 57 million units sold-in worldwide, including over 22 million units of Borderlands 2, which is the highest-selling title in the history of 2K. The most recent installment, Borderlands 3, which launched in September 2019, already sold-in nearly 8 million units worldwide and was honored with the award for “Best Multiplayer Game” at Gamescom.
(Photo Credit: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Film at Lincoln Center)
