'Borderlands' Movie Casts Cate Blanchett As Lilith

Eli Roth's Borderlands movie just landed a surprising cast member: Cate Blanchett. Blanchett will play Lilith, one of the four playable characters in the original Borderlands game who has remained a supporting character in the franchise ever since. In the mythology of the game, Lilith is "from the planet Dionysus and is one of six Sirens, a group of women with unbelievable powers." Blanchett and Roth previously worked together on The House with a Clock in Its Walls.Variety has the scoop on Cate Blanchett joining the Borderlands movie cast for Lionsgate and director Eli Roth.. The film is an adaptation of the Borderlands game, which was released in 2009 and spawned three sequels –  Borderlands 2 in 2012, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel in 2014, and Borderlands 3 in 2019. The first game was "set in the distant future, at a time when various mega-corporations seek control of various planets to colonize and mine for their mineral wealth and resources." When one of thoe mega-corporations discovers an alien vault on the planet Pandora, a team is sent in and ends up having to battle "the local wildlife and bandit population" while "attempting to stop the head of a private corporation army from reaching the vault first."

The character of Lilith has been a part of the franchise since the get-go, and while there was a time when casting Cate Blanchett in a big video game movie might seem weird, the actress has plenty of genre credits to her name at this point, including Thor: Ragnarok. She also has a history with director Eli Roth, having appeared in his House with a Clock in Its Walls in 2018.

Per the Borderlands wiki, "Lilith's action skill is called Phasewalk, which lets her turn invisible to enemies (but not to her teammates, to whom she appears as translucent blue), move much faster, and cause a damaging shockwave (Phase Blast) upon entering and exiting." I don't know about you, but I can't wait to see Cate Blanchett turn translucent blue and also cause a damaging shockwave. That's what cinema is all about.

The Borderlands movie script hails from Craig Mazin, who wrote Chernobyl, and who is also tackling another video game adaptation with The Last of Us TV series over at HBO.

"With Eli's vision and Craig's screenplay, we believe we have cracked the code on bringing the anarchic world of Borderlands to the big screen in a big way that will be a fresh, compelling and cinematic event for moviegoers and fans of the game," said Nathan Kahane, president of the Lionsgate Motion Picture Group, when the movie was announced earlier this year.