The newly announced Borderlands 4 is doing a strange bit of damage control for the Gearbox franchise after the disastrous Borderlands movie.
Yesterday at Gamescom Opening Night Live, the showcase kicked off by revealing Borderlands 4 with a 2025 release window from developer Gearbox. This wasn't exactly the best-kept secret in gaming - just earlier this year, publisher 2K confirmed Borderlands 4 was in active development and just one of "numerous projects" on the way from developer Gearbox.
This was all well before Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford very confidently said Borderlands 4 was the "greatest thing" the studio has ever done. There's dancing around something, then there's whatever Pitchford was doing here.
Oddly, it seems the Borderlands 4 announcement is being taken by series fans to be a brilliant bit of a distraction from the Borderlands movie. The $90 million flop is reportedly heading to streaming services later this month, barely three months after it opened in theatres and failed to recoup a significant amount of its reported $110 million budget - let alone the entire thing.
"Big Brain Move: Give movie rights to your franchise to a group that will butcher it... distraction technique! Follow up: Release un-leaked announcement!" reads one Reddit comment reacting to the game announcement. "Damage control at it’s finest" chimes in another comment.
Obviously, cinematic trailers like the one accompanying Borderlands 4's announcement take a long time to make and don't just happen overnight as damage control for a bad movie. No one here is saying that - they're more angling comments around the weird timing of the trailer arriving as a distraction technique for the movie.
In fact, it's worth pointing out that the Borderlands movie already appears to have had a positive effect on the games it takes inspiration from. Borderlands 3 rocketed up Steam's best-sellers chart last week for example, while Borderlands 2 has also seen a huge influx of players. Even if people didn't love the movie, it's good that they're still trying out Gearbox's games.
Borderlands 4 will add "4 brand-new Vault Hunters," and the devs want classes to add depth to the RPG mechanics but not "at the cost of complexity"
As the Borderlands movie slides into oblivion and Risk of Rain 2's new DLC burns, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford compares himself to The Beatles, who he says only "had a 25% hit rate"
