Uwe Boll's 2013 Postal 2 Kickstarter ended much like his movies, which is to say, badly and without any money. And now it seems that his career has wound up in basically the same way. The director of infamously awful videogame-based movies like Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale, and Far Cry, has announced his retirement from the business, telling Metro that his reason for getting out of the game is simple: There's no money to be made.
"With streaming everywhere there is just a big wave of movies flooding around and you have no impact,” Boll said. “The market is dead. 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.”
Boll said his films have been self-financed since 2005, the same year he released Alone in the Dark and the first Bloodrayne film. He's actually directed, and produced, a number of non-game-based movies since then, but—this will come as a shock, I'm sure—neither they nor his game-based projects have made any money. Not because they were bad movies, according to Boll, but simply because they didn't feature any Hollywood heavyweights.
"[Assault on Wall Street] is way better than Wall Street 2 by Oliver Stone,” he said. “It’s better researched, it’s better written, it’s better, but it doesn’t have Michael Douglas.”
In an ironic twist, he seems to blame the end of his filmmaking career on his choice of subject matter in the early days, specifically the ones that made him so well-known among gamers. "If I hadn’t made the stupid videogame-based movies I would never have amalgamated the capital so I could say, ‘Let’s make the Darfur movie'," he said. "I don’t need a Ferrari, I don’t need a yacht. I invested in my own movies and I lost money.”
Based on his IMDB entry, Boll's last game-based flick was the 2014 release In the Name of the King: The Last Job, although that stretches the Dungeon Siege connection pretty thin; the last to bear an actual game name would be Bloodrayne: The Third Reich, which came out in 2011. His final film, if he sticks to his retirement guns, will be Rampage: President Down, which looks to be a vaguely Postal-like tale about an angry man who shoots the President and then a whole bunch of other guys. Trailer below.
