Borderlands Still Got to Thrive from Its Bad Movie

It wasn’t that long ago that the Borderlands movie came out in theaters and did uh, Not Great in theaters before coming to VOD three weeks later. Critics and audiences more than tore into it, and Lionsgate wanted to pretend it basically didn’t happen. But it apparently wasn’t that much of a bust, because the games’ publisher Take-Two got to laugh all the way to the bank.

This week, studios in both the games and film industries have been posting their financials for the second quarter of the fiscal year, and both Lionsgate and Take-Two—which acquired Borderlands developer Gearbox in March—discussed the poorly received movie, which made $33 million worldwide and cost $120 million to make over about five years, a director change, and alleged rewrites. Lionsgate was pretty direct in calling the whole thing a complete mess: “Everything that can go wrong did go wrong,” said CEO Jon Feltheimer. “It sat on the shelf for too long during the pandemic, and reshoots and rising interest rates took it outside the safety zone of our usual strict financial models. The success of our financial models doesn’t take the place of also getting the creative right.”

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick also dunked on it during his company’s earnings call, politely referring to it as “disappointing.” But while it “wasn’t material” to Take-Two’s results, he said the movie got people to buy more Borderlands games, all of which are on current-gen hardware. Game adaptations often lead to renewed interest in the source material and more sales, so Zelnick considers this “a sign that making a movie or a television show based on our very high quality IP can drive catalogue sales, and that can be a good thing.” If it helps put eyes on the series ahead of Borderlands 4 next year, he can’t be too mad about it.

Or maybe he can. The experience of making the Borderlands movie burned Take-Two enough to reaffirm that it should be selective in what it lets get adapted. Its BioShock franchise is theoretically getting a movie in a few years, and Zelnick said the company “has licensed other titles, and we will continue selectively to do so. But [note the] ever so subtle word, ‘selectively.’”

[via Deadline and VGC]

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