Uwe Boll, notorious director of movies based on games and boxer of critics, hasn’t ravaged one of our beloved properties in some time. And it looks like he never will again, with Boll folding up the director’s chair for good.
Speaking with Richard Crouse of the Toronto Metro, Boll revealed that it no longer made financial sense for him to stay in the movie, er, game:
“The market is dead,” he adds, “you don’t make any money anymore on movies because the DVD and Blu Ray market worldwide has dropped 80 per cent in the last three years. That is the real reason; I just cannot afford to make movies.”
He goes on to say that making “stupid video game based movies” is what gave him the cash to produce more films in the first place, but that reservoir has run dry:
“I’ve been using my money since 2005 and if I hadn’t made the stupid video game based movies I would never have amalgamated the capital so I could say, ‘Let’s make the Darfur movie.’ I don’t need a Ferrari, I don’t need a yacht. I invested in my own movies and I lost money.”
He won’t entirely leave the industry — the article mentions he’ll put more time into “his film distribution business” as well as “Bauhaus”, his apparently excellent restaurant.
Boll may not have left a great legacy, but at the very least his movies were memorable… in an emotionally scarring kind of way.
‘The market is dead’: Schlock director Uwe Boll’s Rampage of terrible films is finished [Toronto Metro, via Blue’s News]
Comments
14 responses to “Uwe Boll, Destroyer Of Game Movies, Quits The Film-Making Business”
Nooooooooo!
This world needs Boll!
Here here!
Good, take your shitty “films” and get out.
And, to quote Monty Python, there was much rejoicing.
To quote Pen and Teller, Bullsh*t!
The DVD and BluRay market is just fine, Boll. You’re just sore that loop holes you used to use to write off the cost of making your movies so you didn’t have to pay tax on any earnings have long since been closed up.
I think it’s more that people would be foolish enough to see it in cinema, but then go and warn people to stay away. So of course when it’s released on DVD/Blu-ray no one buys it.
This. If you make shit films, then yeah no shit you won’t make any money.
I doubt the 80% figure too, but the DVD/Bluray market has almost definitely contracted: the JB Hi-Fi I often visit has reorganised their store reducing the floor space for DVDs/Blurays, and the obvious explanation is that they’re no longer as profitable.
Of course, this doesn’t mean people have stopped watching films: it’s just being transferred to streaming and digital download platforms.
To be honest, I’d think something like Netflix could bring in a bit of extra money for his films: I’m not going to buy his films on DVD, but might stream one.
Can’t say I blame them if that is the case; local distributors here arrogantly up the price thus giving consumers like me a good reason to wait longer for Amazon thus causing the likes of JB to suffer.
Personally, I don’t see home media ever disappearing; streaming license are not always indefinite so it is nice to have a physical copy so that if I have kids of my own, they can sit down and enjoy the same content I did without the hassle that is today’s DRM or any other future method.
Totally. I’m always watching my old vhs tapes with my kids on the vhs player that I haven’t owned for 15 years.
Story checks out. It’s also the explanation they’ve been giving to their shareholders.
https://www.jbhifi.com.au/Documents/2016%20JB%20Hi-Fi%20Annual%20Report_ASX.pdf – Kotaku reported on this earlier in the year about the shrinking ‘software’ sales (down ~7%), reporting on it as games… but reading the actual report reveals that they include music and movie DVDs and blu-rays in the ‘software’ category, alongside games.
Software was over 20% of their business last year (the rest was hardware and ‘services’), now it’s only 14%. Hell of a reduction in one year.
Has anyone actually seen one of his films? I saw FarCry at the shop. It looked pretty awful from the case.
Bloodrayne was…..just terrible.
I think I managed about 15min of House of the Dead… though most of that was in fast forward… I think I gave up after seeing some of the spliced-in footage of the censored version of the game…
Postal on the other hand was quite entertaining – perhaps he didn’t realise it was intended as satire so he took a more serious approach and almost got it right by accident!
Postal was amazing. Everything else Boll did is pure rubbish.