The critically-acclaimed cat-based adventure gameStray is getting an actual animated movie. Even cooler? The title's original publisher Annapurna is making the flick, after it scored a surprise hit on Netflix with its first animated feature Nimona. The creative team is still under wraps, but Annapurna Animation head Robert Baird told Entertainment Weekly that the film is in active development and that it’ll be the “greatest hopepunk movie that's ever been made.”

Baird defines “hopepunk” as a narrative concept that deems optimism as a form of resistance against tyranny. That just about describes the emotional tenor of the game, so Annapurna’s on the right track. Additionally, it’s been confirmed that the game’s companion drone B-12 will be a large part of the film, with Baird stating it’s a “buddy comedy about a cat and a robot” going on to cite the pair’s “hilarious dynamic.”

The original game was released last year and put players in control of a curious cat in a cyberpunk landscape. There’s plenty of platforming, stealth-based traversal and, uh, meows. The title was praised for giving players a cat-level perspective on the world and has been a huge hit on just about every platform.

As for Annapurna, the Stray movie is only a single step in its plans for Hollywood domination. The animation arm of the company announced a few more films and teased plenty more. Chris Wedge, the creator of Ice Age, is directing a movie called FOO, short for fish out of water, and Nimona’s co-director Nick Bruno has signed on to helm an unnamed project that’s only been described as “high concept” and “Spielbergian.”

The company also teased that other games under its umbrella could receive the movie treatment, stating that Stray was chosen as the first adaptation due to it being “wildly popular.” Other titles in the publisher’s roster include the time-loop thriller Twelve Minutes, starring Daisy Ridley and James McAvoy, the Starfield-before-Starfield sci-fi romp Outer Wilds, the narrative mystery Kentucky Route Zero and many more. Each of these would make for a decent movie.

The first trailer for the Five Nights at Freddy’s movie was pretty nifty, but suspiciously light on the game franchise’s renowned murderous animatronics. That issue has been rectified with the latest trailer, as it features prominent appearances from Foxy, Bonnie, Chica and of course, Freddy himself. The homicidal puppets are doing what they do best, murdering people.

You also get a bit more of the plot, which seems to mirror the game. It zeroes in on a character played by Josh Hutcherson, from the criminally underrated Future Man, as he starts a new overnight gig as a security guard at a family entertainment center. However, Freddy and his animatronic gang of thugs pose a terrifying threat to anyone in the building after dark.

As expected, the animatronics look great, nearly matching the game’s original aesthetic. This is no surprise given they were designed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. This is a far leap from Kermit and Miss Piggy, however, as the movie contains plenty of “strong violent content, bloody images and language.”

Despite that warning, it’s rated PG-13, so the gore will likely be kept to a minimum. Five Nights at Freddy’s premieres in theaters and on the streaming service Peacock just in time for Halloween, on October 27th.

Not since The Wizard hyped up an entire generation for Super Mario Bros. 3 has a film about video games felt as naked a marketing ploy as Gran Turismo. Based on an improbable true story, the movie follows Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a 20-something Gran Turismo fanatic who wins a Nissan-sponsored contest to race professionally. Even more improbable (and this is technically a spoiler, but hell, it's also real life), he manages to hold his own in the racing world. The original story was already a dream marketing win for Nissan and Sony, but now the two companies can milk it once again to bolster the mythology of Gran Turismo. Don't call it a game – it's a driving simulator.

Cynicism aside, the Gran Turismo film, directed by Neill Blomkamp (District 9, Chappie), successfully hits every mile marker you'd expect. Mardenborough doesn't have much support from his parents early on, but he ultimately proves them wrong. There's an entitled rival racer from the Cobra Kai school of villainy who you can't help but hate. And the movie sports genuinely thrilling race sequences, thanks to Blomkamp's inventive camera work and use of visual effects. Gran Turismo even manages to get some genuinely moving performances from David Harbour and Djimon Hounsou. It's the very definition of a crowd pleaser.

But the film also constantly reminds you that it's meant to sell you Sony products in an alien reality where Apple doesn't exist. No joke: One character is inexplicably attached to his Walkman cassette player, and he only moves on when he's gifted a modern Walkman digital music player in an overwrought emotional moment. (Outside of Hideo Kojima's Twitter feed, I've never seen a normal human use one of those things.) (Ed note: It’s debatable whether or not the guy who created Death Stranding is a “normal human”.)

Had Sony just relaxed a bit, the film would have seemed less like a desperate marketing ploy. But as it stands, I couldn't help but cringe every time we encountered another moment of corporate promotional synergy. Even before we're introduced to Mardenborough, the movie begins with a short promo reel hyping up Gran Turismo creator Kazunori Yamauchi, who spent five years developing the first game in the series. It's the sort of over-produced clip you'd expect during one of Sony's PlayStation Showcase events or the Game Awards – not a theatrically released film.

Sony also doesn’t trust the audience to view actual footage from the Gran Turismo games. We see Mardenborough playing early on, but it looks far too sharp to be Gran Turismo 5 on the PS3 – the title he actually competed with in real life. Instead, we're shown footage that looks closer to the incredibly realistic PlayStation 5 version of the game (though I wouldn't be surprised if it's all CG generated, instead of showing us actual gameplay). Rather than lean into the incredible lengths Sony pushed the PlayStation 3 at the time, the film sells a beautiful lie.

Of course, you can argue that every adaptation is ultimately a marketing ploy. But even the incredibly safe Super Mario Bros. Movie didn't feel as desperate as Gran Turismo. Sure, Mario was filled with oodles of references for fans, but there was a level of confidence in that movie that Gran Turismo lacks. Nintendo didn't need to push new hardware or games through that movie, its mere existence promoted the company's overall brand.

Sony Pictures Entertainment

It’s almost a miracle that Gran Turismo still manages to be enjoyable. It’s more fun than the forgettable Uncharted movie, and you can’t help but root for Mardenborough. He achieves the ultimate gamer dream: What if you could actually bring your virtual skills to the real world? It’s just a shame that the true story is fundamentally a PlayStation ad, and Sony couldn’t help but use the film to sell itself even more.

The release of Dune: Part Two has been pushed back to March 15th amid ongoing writer and actor strikes, according to Variety. The hotly anticipated film was originally scheduled for November 3rd, but Warner Bros. and producer Legendary Entertainment agreed to delay it over four months — likely because the film wouldn't meet its full box office potential without publicity from the star-studded cast. 

The studio and production company held out on delaying the film as long as possible, according The Hollywood Reporter, but would have needed to start advertising the film by early September. It reportedly hoped the extra time would allow the cast, which includes Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh and Christopher Walken, to participate in a full marketing push.

Along with Part Two, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim have been pushed back to April 12th, 2024 and December 13th, 2024, respectively. Those dates were shuffled largely to accommodate Dune: Part Two. 

The ongoing labor actions by writers and actors in Hollywood are a result of long-simmering tensions over a number of issues, but particularly due to residual payments from Netflix and other streaming platforms. Warner Bros. Discovery was at the center of these in the recent past, as it elected to release some films either directly to its HBO Max (now MAX) streaming platform with zero or limited theatrical releases. However, CEO David Zaslav said last year that the company "will fully embrace theatrical" going forward. 

Dune: Part One performed well enough at the box office with a $402 million gross, but hype for the sequel is much higher. "Part One is more of a contemplative movie. Part Two is an action-packed, epic war movie. It is much more dense. We went to all new locations," said director Denis Villeneuve. 

Steven Spielberg's wholesome sci-fi classic, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, became a cultural touchstone following its release in 1982. The film's hastily-developed (as in, "you have five weeks to get this to market") Atari 2600 tie-in game became a cultural touchstone for entirely different reasons.

In his new book, The Stuff Games Are Made Of, experimental game maker and assistant professor in design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Pippin Barr deconstructs the game design process using an octet of his own previous projects to shed light on specific aspects of how games could better be put together. In the excerpt below, Dr. Barr muses in what makes good cinema versus games and why the storytelling goals of those two mediums may not necessarily align.

MIT Press

Excerpted from The Stuff Games Are Made Of by Pippin Barr. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2023.

In the Atari 2600 video game version of the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Spielberg 1982), also called E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Atari 1982), the defining experience is falling into a pit. It’s cruelly fitting, then, that hundreds of thousands of the game’s physical cartridges were buried in a landfill in 1983. Why? It was one of the most spectacular failures in video game history. Why? It’s often put front and center as the worst game of all time. Why? Well, when you play it, you keep falling into a pit, among other things ...

But was the video game E.T. so terrible? In many ways it was a victim of the video game industry’s voracious hunger for “sure fire” blockbusters. One strategy was to adapt already-popular movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark or, yes, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Rushed to market with a development time of only five weeks, the game inevitably lacked the careful crafting of action-oriented gameplay backed by audience testing that other Atari titles had. I would argue, though, that its creator, Howard Scott Warshaw, found his way into a more truthful portrayal of the essence of the film than you might expect.

Yes, in the game E.T. is constantly falling into pits as he flees scientists and government agents. Yes, the game is disorienting in terms of understanding what to do, with arcane symbols and unclear objectives. But on the other hand, doesn’t all that make for a more poignant portrayal of E.T.’s experience, stranded on an alien planet, trying to get home? What if E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a good adaptation of the film, and just an unpopular video game?

The world of video games has admired the world of film from the beginning. This has led to a long-running conversation between game design and the audiovisual language of cinema, from cutscenes to narration to fades and more. In this sense, films are one of the key materials games are made of. However, even video games’ contemporary dominance of the revenue competition has not been quite enough to soothe a nagging sense that games just don’t measure up. Roger Ebert famously (and rather overbearingly) claimed that video games could “never be art,” and although we can mostly laugh about it now that we have games like Kentucky Route Zero and Disco Elysium, it still hurts. What if Ebert was right in the sense that video games aren’t as good at being art as cinema is?

Art has seldom been on game studios’ minds in making film adaptations. From Adventures of Tron for the Atari 2600 to Toy Story Drop! on today’s mobile devices, the video game industry has continually tried for instant brand recognition and easy sales via film. Sadly, the resulting games tend just to lay movie visuals and stories over tried-and-true game genres such as racing, fighting, or match 3. And the search for films that are inherently “video game-y” hasn’t helped much either. In Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Spider-Man ends up largely as a vessel for swinging and punching, and you certainly can’t participate in Miles’s inner life. So what happened to the “Citizen Kane of video games”?

A significant barrier has been game makers’ obsession with the audiovisual properties of cinema, the specific techniques, rather than some of the deeply structural or even philosophical opportunities. Film is exciting because of the ways it unpacks emotion, represents space, deploys metaphor, and more. To leverage the stuff of cinema, we need to take a close look at these other elements of films and explore how they might become the stuff of video games too. One way to do that in an organized way is to focus on adaptation, which is itself a kind of conversation between media that inevitably reveals much about both. And if you’re going to explore film adaptation to find the secret recipe, why not go with the obvious? Why not literally make Citizen Kane (Welles 1941) into a video game? Sure, Citizen Kane is not necessarily the greatest film of all time, but it certainly has epic symbolic value. Then again, Citizen Kane is an enormous, complex film with no car chases and no automatic weapons. Maybe it’s a terrible idea.

As video games have ascended to a position of cultural and economic dominance in the media landscape, there has been a temptation to see film as a toppled Caesar, with video games in the role of a Mark Antony who has “come to bury cinema, not to praise it.” But as game makers, we haven’t yet mined the depths offered by cinema’s rich history and its exciting contemporary voices. Borrowing cinema’s visual language of cameras, points of view, scenes, and so on was a crucial step in figuring out how video games might be structured, but the stuff of cinema has more to say than that. Citizen Kane encourages us to embrace tragedy and a quiet ending. The Conversation shows us that listening can be more powerful than action. Beau Travail points toward the beauty of self-expression in terrible times. Au Hasard Balthazar brings the complex weight of our own responsibilities to the fore.

There’s nothing wrong with an action movie or an action video game, but I suggest there’s huge value in looking beyond the low-hanging fruit of punch-ups and car chases to find genuinely new cinematic forms for the games we play. I’ll never play a round of Combat in the same way, thanks to the specter of Travis Bickle psyching himself up for his fight against the world at large. It’s time to return to cinema in order to think about what video games have been and what they can be. Early attempts to adapt films into games were perhaps “notoriously bad” (Fassone 2020), but that approach remains the most direct way for game designers to have a conversation with the cinematic medium and to come to terms with its potential. Even if we accept the idea that E.T. was terrible, which I don’t, it was also different and new.

This is bigger than cinema, though, because we’re really talking about adaptation as a form of video game design. While cinema (and television) is particularly well matched, all other media from theater to literature to music are teeming with ideas still untried in the youthful domain of video games. One way to fast-track experimentation is of course to adapt plays, poems, and songs. To have those conversations. There can be an air of disdain for adaptations compared to originals, but I’m with Linda Hutcheon (2012, 9) who asserts in A Theory of Adaptation that “an adaptation is a derivation that is not derivative — a work that is second without being secondary.” As Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin (2003, 15) put it, “what is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media.” This is all the more so when the question is how to adapt a specific work in another medium, where, as Hutcheon claims, “the act of adaptation always involves both (re-)interpretation and then (re-)creation." That is, adaptation is inherently thoughtful and generative; it forces us to come to terms with the source materials in such a direct way that it can lay our design thinking bare—the conversation is loud and clear. As we’ve seen, choosing films outside the formulas of Hollywood blockbusters is one way to take that process of interpretation and creation a step further by exposing game design to more diverse cinematic influences.

Video games are an incredible way to explore not just the spaces we see on-screen, but also “the space of the mind." When a game asks us to act as a character in a cinematic world, it can also ask us to think as that character, to weigh our choices with the same pressures and history they are subject to. Hutcheon critiques games’ adaptive possibilities on the grounds that their programming has “an even more goal- directed logic than film, with fewer of the gaps that film spectators, like readers, fill in to make meaning." To me, this seems less like a criticism and more like an invitation to make that space. Quiet moments in games, as in films, may not be as exhilarating as a shoot-out, but they can demand engagement in a way that a shoot-out can’t. Video games are ready for this.

The resulting games may be strange children of their film parents, but they’ll be interesting children too, worth following as they grow up. Video game film adaptations will never be films, nor should they be—they introduce possibilities that not only recreate but also reimagine cinematic moments. The conversations we have with cinema through adaptation are ways to find brand new ideas for how to make games. Even the next blockbuster.

Yeah, cinema, I’m talkin’ to you.

Netflix is getting the band back together with Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, an anime adaptation of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novel series. The company has dropped the first teaser for the eight-episode show, which centers around the titular character and his attempt to win a battle of the bands contest while facing off against the seven evil exes of his new girlfriend.

The anime follows on from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, a 2010 film based on the graphic novels. The main cast of Edgar Wright's movie are reprising their roles in the series, including Michael Cera (Scott Pilgrim), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Ramona Flowers), Kieran Culkin (Wallace Wells), Chris Evans (Lucas Lee) and Brie Larson (“Envy” Adams).

The teaser apes many of the visuals of the movie and graphic novels, such as Scott blocking a flying attack from Matthew Patel with his arm and the rehearsal space of his band, Sex Bob-Omb. You'll also see Ramona dragging Scott through space toward a door with a star on it and the lovebirds sitting next to each other on a swing set. I don't remember seeing any dinosaurs in the film, though.

Bryan Lee O’Malley, the creator of the graphic novel series, is one of the showrunners, while Wright is an executive producer. Abel Gongora of animation studio Science Saru (Star Wars: Visions, Devilman Crybaby) is the director of the show. Scott Pilgrim Takes Off also includes new music from Anamanaguchi, the terrific chiptune band behind the soundtrack of the Scott Pilgrim vs. The World video game.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World is my favorite movie of the 2010s, and this teaser gets the look and the spirit of the universe spot on. I'm already counting down the days until Scott Pilgrim Takes Off hits Netflix on November 17th.

The Apple TV+ film Tetris was copied from a book written years ago, according to a lawsuit filed against the tech giant and the Tetris Company. Dan Ackerman, the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, has accused the plaintiffs of ripping off his book The Tetris Effect, which tells the history of the game in the form of a Cold War-era thriller. In his lawsuit (PDF, via Reuters), Ackerman said he sent the Tetris Company and its CEO Maya Rogers a pre-publication copy of his book back in 2016. Later that year, his agent received a "strongly worded Cease and Desist letter" to stop him from pursuing film and TV opportunities. 

Ackerman accused Rogers of working with screenwriter Noah Pink to develop a screenplay using content taken from his book without his knowledge or consent. Apparently, numerous producers showed interest in adapting his book, but the Tetris Company refused to license its IP for the project. "This was done at the direction and behest of Ms. Rogers so that she and the Tetris Company could pursue their own project and opportunities based on Mr. Ackerman's book without compensating him," the lawsuit reads. 

In his complaint, Ackerman explained that for writers, the option to license their work for film and TV is typically a major source of revenue. That's why he takes the Tetris Company's actions not as a means to prevent the unauthorized use of its IP, but as an "economic attack" on his business. To drive the point home, Ackerman included quite a lengthy list of "glaring similarities" between his book and the film in his lawsuit. Several items in the list explain how scenes in the movie mirrored his versions of events. That said, those events were based on scenarios that happened in real life, so it remains to be seen if the court will agree with him. Ackerman is asking for actual, compensatory and punitive damages equivalent to 6 percent of the film's $80 million production budget. 

Since last year, Netflix has run a Discord bot that helps people find shows and movies to watch together based on what's available in their location. The company is expanding the "Hey, Netflix" bot's capabilities today with a text-based game.

This is the first time Netflix is bringing a game along these lines to Discord. As you might imagine, it ties into something that you'll be able to stream on Netflix soon, an action movie called Heart of Stone that stars Gal Gadot and Jamie Dornan. The film will land on Netflix this Friday.

In Heart of Stone: Maze of Odds, you'll take on the role of a double agent (similar to Gadot's character in the film). Netflix says you'll need to quickly make decisions in "action-driven situations." Based on some details that Netflix shared in advance, it seems that you'll need to choose between some preset options, much like the interactive TV shows and movies it has released in the past.

Intriguingly, Netflix says Heart of Stone: Maze of Odds will be different each time you play it. The Discord bot randomly chooses scenarios from a bank of situations. Additionally, you'll be able to play it solo or ask friends to join in for multiplayer action. The game includes collectibles for you to pick up along the way too. Lastly, while Discord users around the world can check out the game, it's worth noting that it's only available in English.

Netflix has been making a big push into games in general over the last couple of years. Last month, it released Oxenfree II, the first game from one of its in-house studios. The company also just debuted a game controller app for iPhone and iPad. As such, you'll soon be able to play its games (which are typically included with a Netflix subscription) on compatible TVs as well as phones and tablets.

At one point Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb dons his iconic uniform — a fedora cap, a smoking pipe, a slightly over-sized suit — like Batman wearing his cape and cowl for the first time. It's a look that serves as a sort of armor against mere mortals, who he woos with a peculiar charisma, as well as the military and political bureaucracy he battles while leading the Manhattan Project. It's also a way for Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy) to ground himself as he wrestles with the major conflict around his work: Building an atomic bomb could help to the war, but at what cost to humanity?

Oppenheimer may seem like a curious project for Nolan: Since wrapping up his Batman trilogy with The Dark Knight Rises, he's thrown himself into increasingly complex projects (perhaps to atone for that disappointment). Interstellar was ostensibly a story about a man exploring the cosmos to find a new planet for humanity, but it also wrestled with personal sacrifices as his children aged beyond him.

Universal Pictures

Dunkirk was a purely cinematic, almost dialog-free depiction of a famous wartime evacuation. And Tenet was a bold attempt at mixing another heady sci-fi concept (what if you could go backwards through time?!) with bombastic James Bond-esque set pieces. Oppenheimer, meanwhile, is a mostly talky film set in a variety of meeting rooms, save for one explosive sequence.

Take a step back, though, and a film about an intelligent and very capable man wrestling with huge moral issues is very much in the Nolan wheelhouse. Oppenheimer's swaggering genius fits right alongside Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne/Batman, the dedicated magicians in The Prestige or the expert dream divers/super spies in Inception.

The film, which is based on the biography American Prometheus by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird, follows Oppenheimer from his time in Germany as a doctoral student, to his professorship at UC Berkeley. He mingles with notable scientists, including Albert Einstein himself, and makes a name for himself as a quantum physics researcher. We see Oppenheimer as more than just a bookish geek: He sends money to anti-fascists fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he pushes for unionization among lab workers and professors, and he supports local Communists. (Something that will come back to haunt him later.)

It's not too long before he's recruited to the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb, and the myth-making truly begins. Like a Nolan heist film, he assembles a team of the brightest scientific minds in America and beyond, and he pushes the government to establish a town doubling as a secret research base in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The film is strongest when it focuses on the specificities of the Manhattan Project: the rush to build a bomb before Nazi Germany, the pushback from scientists terrified about the damage "the gadget" could do.

Universal Pictures

The movie firmly focuses on Oppenheimer's point of view, so much so that we mainly see him as a heroic tortured genius. Only he can put the right scientists together and motivate them to work; only he can solve the riddles of quantum physics to keep America safe. Some colleagues criticize his cavalier attitude about building an atomic bomb — they think it can lead to untold disaster, while he naively thinks it may be so powerful it may end all war. But, for the most part, we're left feeling that he was a great man who was ultimately betrayed by a country that didn't care for his post-war anti-nuclear activism.

I wasn't able to see Oppenheimer on an IMAX screen, unfortunately, but sitting front row in a local theater still managed to be a thoroughly immersive experience. That was particularly surp—rising since it's really a movie featuring people (mostly men) talking to each other in a series of unremarkable rooms. Save for one virtuoso set piece — the build-up and aftermath of a successful atomic bomb test is Nolan at his best — what's most impressive is how cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema makes those conversations utterly engaging. We've never seen Cillian Murphy's piercing blue eyes do so much work in close-up.

Universal Pictures

Still, it's an overall disjointed experience. The few featured women — Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, Florence Pugh as the Communist activist Jean Tatlock — are sketched thin, even by Nolan standards. And the movie would have benefitted from more insight into Oppenheimer's thinking. It's a surprisingly standard biopic, even though it's three hours long and far more technical than any studio film this year.

At the very least, it would have been interesting to see Oppenheimer reckon more directly with the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We see him confront President Harry Truman (Gary Oldman) in a vain attempt to stop building nuclear weapons, and the film points to his very public stance against future bombs. But even those scenes feel self-serving.

At the end of the film, Oppenheimer finally comes to understand something many of his colleagues have been saying from the beginning. Nothing will be the same because of him. There is no peace now, only the undying specter of nuclear annihilation.

The Borderlands movie is finally getting a release date. According to a tweet from the game’s official Twitter account it will premiere in theaters on August 9th, 2024.

The film, directed by Eli Roth (best known for Hostel) is based on the popular video game of the same name. Borderlands follows Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a treasure hunter who returns to her home planet of Pandora (unrelated to the Avatar movie). She teams up with Roland (Kevin Hart), Tiny Tina (Arian Greenblatt), Krieg (Florian Munteanu), Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Claptrap (Jack Black) to find the missing daughter of Atlas.

A first look was released last year, though there’s no official trailer yet. It’s peculiar that they’ve decided to announce the release date for the movie more than a year out. What makes it even more odd is that the movie had reportedly wrapped up filming over two years ago in June 2021.

Delays for video game-based movies seem to be increasingly common. The Uncharted movie was delayed several months from its original release date. And when it did release, the film saw mixed reviews, including from Engadget's Devindra Hardawar, who said the Uncharted movie "boldly goes nowhere."The Super Mario Bros. Movie also saw delays in the film’s release. However, that movie set box office records for a video game movie. Barring any further delays, fans should expect to see Borderlands in theaters next year.