Artist Uwe Boll retires... Because there's no money in it

Our long national international nightmare is over: Uwe Boll has decided to stop making movies.

I wish he had decided to stop because he realized what he was making were genuinely terrible pieces of media, but no. He's decided to stop because he feels there's no market for his movies anymore. This has nothing to do with quality, according to him, but rather with critics hating him personally and not even watching his movies before panning them. This despite an impressive Rotten Tomatoes page where his highest rated movie got a 57%, his second highest got 25%, and the lowest (TANG's own Alone in the Dark) got 1%. Not all of these critics can know who he is or can even be video game fans punishing him, they just know his movies are utterly shitty.

I think his reaction to the reaction of his "art" speaks to him being profoundly narcissistic. His excuse that he will stop making movies because there's no money in it anymore and his statement that he made his "stupid video game movies" to fund his more artistic films kind of blatantly tips his hand about what he actually cared about. I feel no sympathy for this man and his awful attempts at movie making and, with the imminent release of Assassin's Creed, can but hope we are entering an era where competent filmmakers will be making our video game movies from now on. Talk of the Tetris trilogy gives me pause in this hope, but at least it'll be a high budget trainwreck, not a Uwe Boll-esque one.

What about y'all, duders? Feeling a bit teary that we won't get any more Boll films? Or feeling just a little bit happier about the world in which we're living?

To be honest, I didn't knew whether he had retired decades ago. Once the initial shock of his movies wear off, his career went the way of the "barely apt for syfy movie" level of intranscendence.

I do have to ask, what were those "more artistic films" he funded with those "stupid video game movies"? Was it "Blubberella"? Or was it "Rampage: Capital Punishment"? Because those doesn't sound like modern movie titles, they sound like parodies of what cheap, 70s movie titles looked like...

Seems good for humanity as a whole.

Well, thanks Uwe. Ryan & Vinny sure squeezed a lot of TANG from him in any case.

A recap, for the uninitiated...

• Postal
• In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
• BloodRayne
• House of the Dead
• Alone in the Dark
• BloodRayne II: Deliverance
• Far Cry

Remember that time Uwe Boll started posting a bunch of crazy rambling YouTube videos? That was fun.

@geraltitude: Thanks for the recap. I am not in favor of endorsing mental distress, but having Ryan relate to us his experiences as he descended into the hearth of darkness was the best thing that came out of Boll's career...

Patrick did a interview with him through skype, it was quite something.

Thanks for the list, I need to re-watch all these... Fuck, now I miss Ryan again.

@theht: "Fack yorself, I have enuff munney to play golf til im dead"

@phoenix654: @hermes: no prob duders. Watch and weep enjoy. TANG is a great way to miss Ryan.

Also, Vinny's editing shenanigans sometimes just rev past overdrive. Some real gems in there.

Definitely this is the best that came from Uwe's oeuvre.

It's weird because his non-videogame movie The Rampage is...actually pretty good. It's weird, disturbing and kind of haunting, but rarely goes for shock-value. It's what the game Hatred would have been if the devs of that weren't just trying to bilk the "anti-SJW" crowd out of money and getting free publicity from press...

But yeah, they closed that tax loophole that was allowing him to make money (which is a shame cause I wonder what German indie films we're now missing out on because that no longer exists) and he is, at his heart, a narcissistic coward. He will not be missed.

Maybe if his movies were any good there would be money in it but this dudes movies are TERRIBLE.

Pro tip, people don't pay you for being bad at your job.

Wait, so my hopes for a Time Crisis movie are dead?!

Saying there is no money in it... is that just the same as saying no one would give him any more money to make another glorious trainwreck?

I still remember that interview Patrick did with him, and seeing his reactions to what he said on stream.

"artist"....Being rather generous there.

I'd say international.

Is he partly to blame for why the money dried up by being the guy that helped establish that video game movies are shit?

Sure Uwe, that's why.

I'd pay to hear commentary from Drew and Dan just watching all of Uwe Boll's movies. :D

I had really thought that this marked the end.

A sad, sad day.

What they close some tax loopholes or something?

That Ain't No Director.

Well, for all his faults, he did something with his life...and that's something in itself. He has a wife half his age, that is seemly semi-talented... and that has to go in the 'win' column as well. More infamous than famous, more mad than a genius; yet, not a bad resume all the same for a 60 y.o. guy.

It's the end of an era. A really profoundly awful era, but an era nonetheless.

Uwe Boll should have made that warcraft movie :D

It is so sad that we dont have Uwe Boll anymore to give us the video game movies that we so desperately long for. The world has lost such a great talent today and the video game movie genre is the poorer for it.

I've only seen a few, but his movies were the special kind of bad I enjoyed watching.

Wow, I hadn't thought about Uwe Boll in years, and I could have done with continuing that streak... Thanks topic creator! ;P

Ain't no thing, duder. Sorry to break the streak.

@bojackhorseman: You are correct, sir. It is now reflected in the original post.

This seems contradictory. He's "retiring" because there's no money in it anymore? But if he's using that word in the usual context, as in he doesn't need to work anymore than... eh?

He got to direct Sir Ben Kingsley. How many of you have that on your resume?

I watch the Dungeon Siege TANG at least once a month just to hear "I'm the king" in Vinnie's horrendous Ray Romano voice. It never stops being hilarious.