Video game film auteur Uwe Boll has made his last movie

He’s finally stopped.

There was a time when German-born director Uwe Boll and video game movies were synonymous. Boll was infamously attached to the notion that you couldn’t turn a video game into a good movie.

House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne, Name of the King: The list of video games turned into theatrical tripe by Boll goes on and on. When I spoke with him in 2006 he told me he was so busy that, despite having a trail of critically panned movies to his name, he was turning away work.

“Look, I’m super busy,” he said at the time. “I can do three movies in two years . . . so the earliest time I could do Hitman or Metal Gear Solid would be the fall of 2007.”

Fortunately, some would say, Boll never got to either of those properties. At the time he was wrapping up Name of the King and beginning work on Postal.

But the years, the critics and the finances of movie making, it seems, haven’t been kind to Boll. We’ve reached out to Boll and will update this story when he responds. In an interview with Metro News, the filmmaker says he’s made his last.

“The market is dead,” he said, “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.”

“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.”

Boll went on to say that he has been using the money he made on “stupid video game based movies” to pay for his passion projects like Attack on Darfur and Assault on Wall Street, both of which were also critically panned.

As has long been the case, Boll blames the movie flops and their loss of money on the critics, people who he has long said don’t even watch his films before panning them.

“Now when I don’t make any more movies,” he said, “maybe they’ll find the time to actually watch the movies, starting with Postal in 2005, the movies of the last ten years. 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.”