Despite the less-than-impressive reaction to the Borderlands film, the project boosted sales of the games.
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Borderlands is a first-person looter shooter, set in an epic space western landscape. The beloved series features four mainline games and a number of spin-offs.
The long-awaited Borderlands feature film was released earlier this year and saw Cate Blanchett’s Lilith return to the place she grew up to form an alliance with a team of misfits in order to find the missing daughter of the most powerful man in the universe. The film also featured Russian boxer-turned-actor Florian Munteanu as Krieg alongside Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart and Jack Black.
However it was a critical and commercial failure. Borderlands currently has a 10 per cent approval rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes and was reported to have taken just $30million (£23.25million) at the global box office, against a budget of over $120million (£83.7million). In an attempt to make back some of the money, the film was released onto streaming after only three weeks and game developers tried to distance themselves from the project by confirming a 2025 release window for the long-awaited Borderlands 4.
But according to publishers Take-Two, the film actually improved sales of Borderlands games.
“With regard to Borderlands, we don’t really need to break out the contribution from the film because while it was economically positive, it wasn’t material to our results,” CEO Strauss Zelnick said during a financial meeting yesterday (November 6). “Even though the film was disappointing, it actually benefited our catalogue sales.”
He went on to say that “making a movie or a television show based on our very high quality IP can drive catalogue sales,” but confirmed the studio were being “really selective” with future projects. “We would really prefer that everything that comes out with our brands in it is really, really successful.”
In September, Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford compared himself to The Beatles after the disappointing reaction to the Borderlands film. “I wish everything could be a hit, but that is not how it works. The greatest musical act of all time, The Beatles, had a 25 per cent hit rate.
“I’m sure every song they recorded was done with love and commitment to the art and belief in the quality of their work. When artists have a miss, that’s when they need fans the most to root them on so they are motivated to keep creating,” he told fans on social media.
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