When the Borderlands movie bombed on the world stage, it barely managed to scrape back its marketing budget, let alone what was spent securing the likes of Cate Blanchett and Jack Black. But Take-Two Interactive ZEO, Strauss Zelnick, doesn't think it did lasting damage to the video game franchise from which it was adapted.
Zelnick spoke to IGN ahead of the company's Q2 earnings call today. While he admitted "obviously that movie was disappointing," he prefers to focus on the fact that it "actually sold more catalogue". Still, the head honcho isn't worried, believing the Borderlands IP to be resilient: "I don't think it hurt at all, if anything I think it may have helped a little bit. It highlights something that I've spoken about many times: the difficulty of bringing our intellectual property to another medium."
In case you missed it, Randy Pitchford, founder and CEO of Gearbox Software, the developer behind Borderlands, memorably compared the studio, following the movie's abysmal launch, to The Beatles, insisting that even arguably the greatest band of all time only had about a 25% hit rate.