Take-Two’s CEO wants people to give the Borderlands movie “a chance” despite overwhelmingly negative reviews.
It’s been a rough start for Lionsgate’s Borderlands movie adaptation – about as rough as it can get, really. After debuting on Rotten Tomatoes with a 0% critics score when the advance viewing embargo lifted for press on August 8th, things haven’t improved much from there. Currently, the Eli Roth-directed movie has only managed to crawl toward a 9% Tomatometer score based on 87 reviews, with over 100 audience reviews only earning a 49% Audience Score. While the movie still has its full release weekend ahead of it, it’s looking bleak for the newest video game adaptation.
Take-Two Interactive, the current owner of Borderlands game developer Gearbox Entertainment after the company purchased the latter from the Embracer Group earlier this year, hasn’t given up hope that reception to the movie could turn around. Speaking to IGN, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick was asked whether or not the failed critical reception to Borderlands would have an impact on Take-Two specifically.
“Let’s give the film a chance. A lot of people worked really hard on it. The underlying intellectual property is phenomenal, the cast is amazing, I think the look and feel is really terrific. So let’s see what audiences have to say,” Zelnick responded. “But to answer your question, no, the performance of the film wouldn’t have a financial impact on us or on the franchise one way or another.”
IGN then asked Zelnick about his opinion on video game adaptations in general, and he reiterated that Take-Two is “really selective” about the games they license into movies, asserting “It’s not really core to [them],” referring to Take-Two. He then added that he expects the company will “probably maintain” its selective approach in the future. To note, Take-Two also has another movie adaptation in the works with Netflix, a BioShock adaptation which recently received an update during San Diego Comic-Con that may indicate a worrisome future for that movie as well.
As for the Borderlands franchise as a whole, while it hasn’t been revealed officially there’s already been plenty of buzz surrounding Borderlands 4 this year – so hopefully the franchise can get back into its fans’ good graces in the future with an entry with better reception than the movie has received, or the most recent mainline game Borderlands 3, which maintains a mixed user score on Metacritic.
