Handsome Jack will be in Borderlands 3 – Kinda

I noticed several movie posters that featured Handsome Jack throughout my play session at the Borderlands 3 reveal event. Surprised by the fact that he has some presence in the game I took a photo of the poster and started asking questions to several of the developers.

The main point that came out of these conversations is that Handsome Jack is dead, however, his persona did leave an impact on the Borderlands universe.  He is a too important character to just write off, therefore, there are some references to him in Borderlands 3. The vibe I got from the conversation is that there is some cool stuff for us to discover, however, they didn’t tell me. They did tell me that they looked at what made him such a good antagonist and applied some of those lessons to the Calypso Twins.

Note: I think the thing they wanted to tell but couldn’t, was the Handsome Jackpot DLC.

Handsome Jack is dead. He’s such a big character in our universe though. There’s always going to be some stuff–there may be a side mission or something and then we mention him a few times. It’s so hard to get away from that impact. But you’re not ever going to see Handsome Jack come back as a character. 

Randy Varnell – Managing Producer of Narrative

Poster Analysis

If we look closely at the Handsome Jack poster we see the re-use of his Borderlands 2 character render. Also at the bottom, we see the iconic welcome to pandora billboard. This looks to be a poster for an actual movie within the game’s universe. At the top of the poster, we can see it’s a “harder than hard production”, the movie is titled “Handsome Jack – Tames Pandora”, and the exciting thing is that at the bottom you can see Timothy Doppelman as one of the actors. This clearly is a stage name for Timothy Lawrance, who was the doppelganger of Handsome Jack, whom we got the know in Borderlands the Pre-Sequel. It looks like Timothy is profiting from Jack’s legacy. He already had to pretend to be Jack as his doppelganger, so playing him in a movie isn’t that of a challenge.