Borderlands publisher urges fans to ‘give film a chance’ despite horrendous reviews

Take-Two’s CEO is urging fans to give the Borderlands film a chance as it debuted to a slew of horrendous reviews.

The Borderlands film finally arrived on August 8, and many are already dubbing it one of the worst films of the year. Debuting with an embarrassing 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s not a great start for the franchise.

Be it the film’s overuse of cliches, viewers calling it “lifeless” and “unfunny,” or being lambasted as a “disgrace” to the video game franchise, it’s not sitting well. Here at Dexerto, we gave it a 3/5, calling it a “mindless laugh.”

The film’s release coincided with Take-Two’s Q1 2025 earnings call, the parent company of Borderlands’ developer Gearbox Software, and its CEO is now urging fans to give the film a chance amid the torrent of bad reviews.

In an interview with IGN, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said of the film’s negative reviews, “Let’s give the film a chance. 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.”

Despite the poor critical reception, Zelnick said the film will not affect Take-Two’s finances or have a massive impact on the game franchise as a whole.

“No, the performance of the film wouldn’t have a financial impact on us or on the franchise one way or another,” Zelnick clarified.

However, Zelnick said that Take-Two is generally “really selective” regarding which games will be made into films. The financial impact of licensing a game into a film isn’t small says Zelnick, so they only ever do it if the creators are excited about it.

Besides Borderlands, the only other video game adaptation Take-Two has planned is a BioShock adaptation with Netflix.

In 2022 Netflix and Take-Two entered into a partnership to create a BioShock film, though the last update we got was in late 2023 when its director gave an update on the script.