Take-Two CEO Says Borderlands Movie Was ‘Disappointing’ But ‘Didn’t Hurt at All’

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 franchise in derivative, regrettable fashion.”

Meanwhile, Take-Two confirmed in its earnings that Borderlands 4 is still planned for release in fiscal 2026 (which runs from April 2025 through March 2026), as is Mafia: The Old Country. Grand Theft Auto 6 is still planned for fall of 2025, with Zelnick saying he still feels confident in that date. Ken Levine’s Judas is still TBA, with Zelnick telling IGN that he feels “really, really good about it and I think Ken Levine’s team is totally focused on innovation.” Take-Two says it has approximately 37 games expected to release through its fiscal 2027.

The company reported today net bookings of $1.47 billion driven by GTA and Borderlands, with digitally delivered net bookings accounting for 96% of the total. 82% of Take-Two’s console game sales were digital for the quarter, up from 75% at this time last year.

Grand Theft Auto 5 has sold over 205 million units globally, Red Dead Redemption 2 has sold over 67 million units, and NBA 2K25, which launched September 3, has reached nearly 4.5 million copies sold. Take-Two is expecting full year net bookings of between $5.55 billion and $5.65 billion. The company also just announced it sold its indie Private Division label to an unknown buyer, after the label suffered a slow demise including layoffs and studio closures.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].