The head of Gearbox is not taking the failure of the Borderlands movie well, but he is keen to keep the hype going for a new game reveal.
It’s hard to spin being the biggest flop of the year into a positive, but rather than trying to lay low until everyone’s forgotten about the Borderlands movie (which shouldn’t take long, considering how completely forgettable it is) Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford has been struggling to cope on Twitter.
The movie has a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and just 27 out of 100 on Metacritic and yet Pitchford has been insisting that lots of people have enjoyed it and blocking anyone on Twitter that disagrees – including many long-term members of the Borderlands community.
Pitchford has promised to undo some of the damage but in the meantime he’s trying to change the subject, by once again hinting at an imminent announcement for Borderlands 4 (the game, not a direct to video movie).
This is not the first, or even the second, time that Pitchford has unsubtly hinted at Borderlands 4, only last month suggesting that ‘sooner rather than later’ he’s going to be talking about what the studio is working on at the moment.
It’s been five years since Borderlands 3 and no doubt the original idea was that the movie would’ve created additional hype for the unveiling of the new game, but clearly that’s not going to work.
Despite what it looks like, this tweet does not seem to have been aimed at anyone specific and was instead meant for Borderlands fans in general:
‘So what you’re saying is: You like what my friends and I do with our Borderlands video games even more than you like what some of the biggest and best cast and crew of film makers on the planet have done. I’m super flattered! We’re working extra hard four you on what’s next…’
He’s also previously added that the announcement will be ‘before the end of the year’ or ‘maybe sooner’ (which unless he’s got a time machine makes no sense, but never mind).
‘I have the biggest and best team that I’ve ever had working on what we know is exactly what our fans want from us – so I’m very, very thrilled,’ Pitchford told Games Radar.
‘I can’t wait to talk about it! I wish I could just gush right now because we’ve got so much to say!’
The implication that a reveal is happening very soon has led many to assume he’s teasing an announcement during the Gamescom Opening Night Live event on Tuesday, August 20. So far though there’s been nothing else, including leaks, to suggest that’s the case.
That doesn’t mean it won’t happen – sometimes the games industry does manage to keep a secret – but it may be that the game is getting its own separate online reveal event (or that it’ll be at the Tokyo Game Show in September, but that seems unlikely).
What’ll be interesting once it is revealed, is how much it resembles the movie. Although the film was a very loose adaptation of the first game it was finished and shelved for several years before its release, so Gearbox would’ve been able to refer to it in detail while making Borderlands 4.
Whether they’re now frantically trying to take those references back out we may never know, but this is all an interesting example of how a high-profile adaptation can damage the reputation of franchise, rather than, as happened with Fallout, drastically increasing its sales.
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