In the face of its absolute panning by critics, the CEO of Borderlands series publisher Take-Two is asking fans to give Eli Roth’s live-action film adaptation of the Gearbox-developed looter shooter series “a chance”.
Arriving roughly a decade after the iron was hot for such an adaptation, the live-action Borderlands film has been, to say the least, an absolute miss with critics thus far.
As of writing, the film currently holds a 7% ‘Rotten’ critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, having received only three positive professional reviews out of the forty-five given to it so far.
“I’ve never played the games, but I got a kick out of Blanchett starring in a movie like this – and doing a great job!” reads the film’s most objectively positive review, as left by Beyond the Trailer’s Grace Randolph .”I do wish the script had been adjusted a bit better to accommodate her age. Blanchett fans will enjoy this, not sure about anyone else.”
(Notably, while the film also presently holds a 60% audience rating, it should be noted that not only has the film yet to officially release to general audiences, but a number of the positive ratings were given by either die-hard Borderlands fans, or in the case of the user who opined “This movie is not as good as Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star or Megamind VS The Doom Syndicate but it was good enough to make me leave my wife of over 5 years, very clear trolls.)
Likewise, based on 23 total critic reviews, the Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart-led film holds a “generally unfavorable” aggregate score of 29 on fellow aggregator Metacritic, with only one review – that being from ScreenRant’s Tatian Hullender – being considered outright positive (and even then, said review acknowledges that “Some jokes fall flat, perhaps due to pacing or editing” and “The movie rushes through plot points without luxuriating in the finer details”).
Given the film’s less-than-stellar reception, ahead of the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call, IGN‘s Rebekah Valentine sought to press the aforementioned CEO, Strauss Zelnick, as to whether or not success or failure of the live-action Borderlands would have any impact on Take-Two’s overall operations.
In turn, the exec asserted, “Let’s give the film a chance.”
“A lot of people worked really hard on it,” he explained. “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. 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.”
For those looking to suffer through what appears to be an absolutely awful adaptation of an already Reddit-humor-tier-heavy series, Borderlands officially opens its vault on August 9th.
