Watch On
Look, the Borderlands film sucks. It sucks bad. This will likely come as zero surprise if you’ve been online enough to watch even one of the pre-release trailers or catch any of the discourse around them, and if you were lucky enough to avoid that the critical reviews have been brutal: We forced Joshua Wolens to watch it yesterday and it left him longing for the relative pleasures of the famed 1993 stinkeroo Super Mario Bros, which believe it or not is one of the less vicious critiques of the Borderlands film I’ve read over the past 24 hours.
But critics and audiences can sometimes diverge—plenty of crapola movies attract big audiences and make serious bank—and while I don’t think that’s likely to happen here, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick hopes it will.
“Let’s give the film a chance,” Zelnick told IGN. “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’s interest stems from the fact that Gearbox is now a Take-Two property: The publisher acquired Gearbox from the shambolic wreckage of Embracer Group earlier this year for $460 million, which for the record is far less than half of what Embracer paid for Gearbox when it picked up the studio in 2021.
While the Borderlands film has only been out for a day, what audiences have had to say so far has not been good. The “audience score” on Rotten Tomatoes is a lowly 48%, and while that’s miles above and beyond the critical consensus—the official Tomatometer score currently sits at an impressively awful 6%—it’s still not good.
This weekend will tell the tale: If Borderlands has any shot at filling seats and making back some of its production budget, it’s going to happen over the next three days. I don’t think any big blockbusters are slated to debut this weekend, which is a little bit of good news for Borderlands, but the Deadpool and Wolverine behemoth is still cruising along—although the fact it’s rated R, as opposed to PG-13 as Borderlands is, puts a little space between the two.
The good news for Take-Two is that even if Borderlands does bomb as badly as it so clearly deserves to, it won’t make a difference to the company’s bottom line: “The performance of the film wouldn’t have a financial impact on us or on the franchise one way or another,” Zelnick said. A little bit of a lingering bad smell, though? I think that may be tougher to avoid.
