If there’s one thing we know about two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett (other than the fact that she’s won two Oscars), it’s that she’s a big fan of raiding with her squad, min-maxing her main, and grabbing tons and tons of that sweet epic loot. Golds only. No blues, no purps. It makes perfect sense, then, that she’d want to star in Eli Roth’s adaptation of the Borderlands video games, which we heard was in the works back in February. Blanchett’s potential involvement isn’t a sure-thing yet, but Deadline says that she’s currently “in talks” to star as Lilith, one of the four playable characters from the original Borderlands game and one of the more memorable characters of the whole series—which is mostly because she’s actually kind of cool and interesting and doesn’t constantly screech out bad jokes and meme references. Blanchett previously appeared in Roth’s The House With A Clock In Its Walls.
The Borderlands games are all loot-based shooters, which means you use guns to kill monsters and bad guys and then their lifeless corpses spit out new guns that are (hopefully) better than the ones you currently have. The story, which involves treasure hunters trying to beat an evil corporation and bandits to a mythical Vault, is there to explain what you’re doing with these increasingly more powerful guns, but it’s not typically the main draw. That makes the idea of a Borderlands movie somewhat surprising, especially one directed by Eli Roth with a freakin’ Oscar winner as one of the main stars, but maybe that means Lionsgate (the studio behind this project) is taking it more seriously than we’d expect for a video game adaptation. And hey, if we’re going for epic loot, let’s go for epic loot and get four Oscar winners in this thing. Or even five. Daniel Day-Lewis can come out of retirement to play Claptrap.