After years of seemingly every movie based on a video game franchise being varying degrees of terrible , it appeared as though we'd entered a sort of golden age. Between movies like the box office-winning The Super Mario Bros. Movie and the Sonic the Hedgehog films, to TV adaptations like The Last of Us and Fallout , it really looked like Hollywood figured out the secret sauce to making adaptations of games that were at worst entertaining and at best really good.
Then the Borderlands movie happened. Borderlands was destroyed by critics and not embraced by audiences. The film was an absolute box office bomb and it was everything that is bad about video game adaptations.
Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of Borderlands game developer Gearbox Software, recently admitted to IGN that the movie was bad, but he says that nothing was “hurt” by the movie’s failure. In fact, the movie appears to have been a good thing on balance. Strauss explained.
.. Obviously that movie was disappointing.
That said, it actually sold more catalog. So, I don't think it hurt at all, if anything I think it may have helped a little bit. It does highlight something that I've spoken about many times which is the difficulty of bringing our intellectual property to another medium.
Strauss says that Borderlands “sold more catalog,” indicating that Take-Two, who also publishes the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption games, among many others, may have sold the rig.