The Borderlands Movie hit box offices back in August to poor results, to say the least. But Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick doesn't think the film hurt the Borderlands video game franchise at all. In fact, if anything, he thinks the movie was good for the games.
Speaking to IGN ahead of the company's Q2 earnings call today, Zelnick admitted that Borderlands hadn't performed as well as he'd hoped, but that he doesn't feel too torn up about it: "Obviously that movie was disappointing," he said. "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." What Zelnick is referring to here are his previous comments on video game film adaptations. When we spoke to him back in August, he told us that the economic impact of licensing a game IP to a movie is small, and in previous interviews ( like this one with Inverse ) he's talked about how risky it is to adapt vidoe game licenses to other mediums.
While it didn't seem to hurt Borderlands in this instance, it's clear that the performance of the film has confirmed at least some of Zelnick's predictions about such an endeavor. We gave the Borderlands film a 3/10 at IGN , calling it "a catastrophic disappointment that plays like hacked-to-pieces studio slop, betraying everything fans adore about Gearbox Software’s.
