Jack Black to play the Jack Black-ish robot Claptrap in Eli Roth's Borderlands movie

The weird back-and-forth casting of Eli Roth’s movie adaptation of the Borderlands games has once again hit a nice “oh, that makes” volley, much like when Kevin Hart signed on (as opposed to when Cate Blanchett and Jamie Lee Curtis signed on), with Variety reporting that overly enthusiastic human Jack Black has joined the cast as overly enthusiastic robot Claptrap. This has been one of the interesting question marks about this adaptation, since Claptrap is a big part of the games (for better or worse) and who they got to play him in the movie would invariably go a long way toward whatever kind of tone Roth is planning for this thing. Jack Black makes plenty of sense as Claptrap, because he’s loud and in-your-face, but also he’s generally more likable than Claptrap is in the video games, so it’s hard to argue with this.

The Borderlands games are about a team of Vault Hunters searching the planet Pandora for some kind of fabulous treasure, collecting millions of different guns and making snarky comments along the way. Claptrap is sort of the mascot, one of a series of little robots that like to pop up in various places and… making snarky comments. Hart is playing Roland, the soldier, Blanchett is playing Lilith, a woman with magic powers, and Curtis is playing Tannis, a scientist. There are still two members of the main cast to go (assuming there isn’t a big change to the games), so we have will continue to look forward to more Borderlands news. Given the established pattern, the next person cast could be an Oscar-winner or an A-list celebrity!