Legendary schlock auteur Uwe Boll has had enough. The German-born director of such poorly received flicks as HOUSE OF THE DEAD and BLOODRAYNE has decided to pull out of the collision course we call Hollywood, saying the release of his next film RAMPAGE: PRESIDENT DOWN shall be his last:
Rampage 3 will be watched on Netflix, DVD or iTunes or whatever. They’ll say, ‘That wonderful movie! I liked it blah, blah, blah,’ then watch Avengers. With streaming everywhere there is just a big wave of movies flooding around and you have no impact.
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.
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.
Of course, this is also attached to a rant about how his movies address "real issues":
It’s not Jason Bourne or any bulls— movie where they make stuff up. My movies are real.
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. 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.”
This shouldn't exactly come as a surprise, considering that Boll recently uploaded a video entitled "F**k You All" when his Kickstarter project didn't go as planned. This has been percolating for some time, and the director has finally decided that self-funding his movies is a wasted effort. He will now be splitting his time between his film distribution business and his Vancouver restaurant Bauhaus.
His many detractors will find it easy to cheer his departure from the industry, but he has a point. Whether or not you liked his films (and yes, we know you didn't), this is a self-assured, self-funded filmmaker who is being swallowed up by the death throes of the Hollywood machine. That spells bad news for indie filmmakers everywhere, and I hope he's being his normal hotheaded self instead of predicting a massive trend of future years of moviemaking.