Here’s some news that may upset one or two people out there, as controversial German filmmaker Uwe Boll has revealed to Metro that he’s calling time on his career, as he feels “the market is dead” and it is no longer “financially profitable” for him to keep making movies.
“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,” said Boll. “That is the real reason; I just cannot afford to make movies. I can’t go back to student filmmaking because I have made so many movies in my life, and I can’t make cheaper and cheaper movies at my age. It’s a shame. I would be happy to make movies but it is just not financially profitable.”
“I never had people giving me money,” he continued. ““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.”
Boll has forged a career making low-budget, critically-derided movies such as the video game adaptations Alone in the Dark, House of the Dead, BloodRayne, In the Name of the King, Postal and Far Cry, and has been highly outspoken against his critics, even going as far as to box a handful of them, earning the nickname The Raging Boll.
“Now when I don’t make any more movies, maybe they’ll find the time to actually watch the movies, starting with Postal in 2005, the movies of the last ten years,” he added. “They will see they were a lot of very interesting movies and a lot of movies that I think made sense and said a point about things. They deserve to be discussed bigger than they were.”
Originally published October 27, 2016. Updated January 23, 2020.
