Uwe Boll To Quit Making Movies With 1M Signatures

An anonymous reader writes to mention that Uwe Boll, the infamous German director behind such video game adaptations as House of the Dead, BloodRayne, Dungeon Siege and Postal, has recently admitted that he would retire from making movies if enough people want him to stop. When FearNet mentioned to Boll a petition online signed by 18,000 people requesting that he cease making films, Boll responded that '18,000 is not enough to convince me.' So how much would be enough? 'One million,' Boll said."

Signed, signed, SIGNED!

Where do I sign? Do you need blood? Money? A donation? How many times can I sign? Fucking I'LL SIGN!

Re:Signed, signed, SIGNED!

Petition Link [petitiononline.com]

Re:Signed, signed, SIGNED!

Thank you, ok, clicked the link. Sign petition button... they want my name... alright, Wil...Wheaton... email, wil@...wilwheaton.net... comment. Oh, this should be good. Alright, "Dr Shitboll, if the Special Olympics had a movie-making competition, you would win a medal... and not just one for participation like Wes Anderson."

There, that should do it. Well now Wil can't petition... he probably wouldn't use his own name anyway. I'm sure he'd go with Brent Spiner or something. Ok, done and done.

Re:Signed, signed, SIGNED!

Where do I sign? Do you need blood? Money? A donation? How many times can I sign? Fucking I'LL SIGN!

I reacted slightly differently. At first, yes I was eager to sign this ... but then I paused ... what about the Mystery Science Theater 3000s and Cinematic Titanics of the future? Where will they buy the rights to destroy movies for a couple thousand dollars?

Re:Signed, signed, SIGNED!

what about the Mystery Science Theater 3000s and Cinematic Titanics of the future? Where will they buy the rights to destroy movies for a couple thousand dollars?

Obviously you haven't been keeping up with Hollywood's latest technology. At this point you could do a whole season of MST3k just by hitting IMDB and doing a search for any movie featuring a dragon.

Sign the petition!

Over 60k signatures already!

http://www.petitiononline.com/RRH53888/petition.html [petitiononline.com]

Re:Sign the petition!

Its just a PR stunt. Stop pandering to the tax-loophole-exploiting jerk.

A PR stunt it may well be, but I take exception to your characterization of his financing methods. At least according to his Wikipedia entry, he is one of the few people in Germany using the German tax laws in regards to German film fiancing on the way the German government intended it. the article states most "German" film financing using these "tax-loopholes" are mere exploits used to finance American films.

His movies may suck, but at least he is using the money and tax laws as they were intended!

What's so bad about Uwe Boll?

Having never seen a Uwe Boll movie, can someone tell me what's so bad about him? He's got some serious hate going on on the internet, and I'm just a bit curious as to why?

Re:What's so bad about Uwe Boll?

He makes your eyes bleed... seriously. (I've tried to watch some of his stuff, I couldn't take it)

Re:What's so bad about Uwe Boll?

He makes your eyes bleed... seriously. (I've tried to watch some of his stuff, I couldn't take it)

Maybe he should change his name to Ewe Bola!
Ba-dum-dum!
Thanks, I'll be here all week!

Re:What's so bad about Uwe Boll?

His movies are bad. Really, really bad. Unfortunately, they're not bad in the kind of way that they become unintentionally funny, they're just mindnumbingly bad.

Please, take my word for it. Don't watch any of them just to find out. I'd hate to have another human being waste 2 hours on that dreck if I can help it.

Re:What's so bad about Uwe Boll?

Having never seen a Uwe Boll movie, can someone tell me what's so bad about him? He's got some serious hate going on on the internet, and I'm just a bit curious as to why?

Imagine a modern hog factory farm, imagine the veritable rivers of semi-liquid feces squelching downhill from the oinking, shuffling pigflesh. Imagine a rope around your leg, the far end attached to a speedboat. Imagine being pulled backwards through that stinking mass, mouth clenched tight against your bile but still the runny shit makes it up your nostrils and down your throat, between your eyelids, burning your retinas, the impact of the brown waves against your body like sledgehammers.

If you can tell me what's so bad about that, I can tell you what's so bad about Uwe Boll movies.

Re:What's so bad about Uwe Boll?

You work for the US Government's Torture Oversight Committee don't you?

Re:What's so bad about Uwe Boll?

Imagine a modern hog factory farm, imagine the veritable rivers of semi-liquid feces squelching downhill from the oinking, shuffling pigflesh. Imagine a rope around your leg, the far end attached to a speedboat. Imagine being pulled backwards through that stinking mass, mouth clenched tight against your bile but still the runny shit makes it up your nostrils and down your throat, between your eyelids, burning your retinas, the impact of the brown waves against your body like sledgehammers.

Or to put it another way, if you were to take the paragraph above and adapt it as a screenplay, the result would be better than any Uwe Boll movie.

Re:What's so bad about Uwe Boll?

Having never seen a Uwe Boll movie, can someone tell me what's so bad about him?

• -His movies are bad. Really, universally accepted as terrible.
• -He keeps getting handed video game franchises to make movies out of, which is problematic because video game fans hate to see their favorite franchises turned into crappy movies, but it has further reaching implications in that it states, essentially, that the movie industry has no respect for the video game industry since they keep letting this man make shitty movies (that lose money, no less)
• -His initial career was only made possible due to a loophole in German tax law which allowed him to spend other people's money on his bad movies since they could write off the loss for tax purposes. Once that loophole was closed, he decided to stop making expensive ($1M+) movies
• -He's quite arrogant and usually pretty angry (which you might be too if people kept shitting on your movies
• -He lured critcs out to a charity fight [wired.com] and then beat the snot out of them, sending one to the hospital

On a deeper level, whereas people like you and me have to work our asses off, he's rich off his no-talent works because of a (now closed) loophole. He wipes his asses with video game franchises (the Postal movie actually made 9/11 jokes) and he's a pretty despicable human being (see the Wired article above).

There's nothing that bad about Uwe Boll

He makes averagely bad straight-to-video style films - yet rises above the mass of other jobbing directors with his ability to drum up publicity. FFS - how may other 'directors of his calibre' can you name? Reason he's working (putting aside tax breaks), is that he takes a relatively small amount of money from producers, rights for a computer game and makes them all money on the film he produces.

Re:What's so bad about Uwe Boll?

Having never seen a Uwe Boll movie, can someone tell me what's so bad about him? He's got some serious hate going on on the internet, and I'm just a bit curious as to why?

He engenders the degree of hate (particularly on the internet) that he does for a couple of reasons. The first is that his movies are bad -- and I mean really, painfully, teeth-grindingly bad. Of course that alone doesn't generate that much hate; there are, after all, an endless supply of incredibly bad movies and abysmal movie makers in the world. The second point is that Uwe Boll has a great love of "adapting" computer games for the screen, and he is highly prolific at doing so. This manages to piss of geeks by raping their fond memories of games (Boll has a habit of going after older games, as far back as the 80s) by butchering what made the game good and simultaneously making something that, while attractive from the title, is painful to sit through. For those who have wised up and don't attend his films, there's still the niggling fact that, by producing so many video game based films that are so very bad, Boll has gone a long way toward discrediting both video games, and the idea of making films based on video games (in this latter point he is hardly alone of course). Since internet geeks and video game geeks have a nice large overlap, this makes internet based Boll hate something that gets noticed.

Re:What's so bad about Uwe Boll?

As someone who actually works in the film industry, I'm not too quick to complain, since all of his films generally result in people working....

But on the other hand, his films are some of the most cynically exploitive junk you've ever seen. He uses a provision in the German tax code to get tax credits and free money, and uses those to bootstrap foreign distribution pre-sales and video-game tie in deals. In effect, he's made money before he even starts rolling the camera, and so the quality of his film itself is irrelevant as long as it cuts a good trailer, will have a good poster, and has enough "bankable" stars in the project to stimulate box office. It's essentially the Roger Corman model, just without the class and punk authenticity.

Re:What's so bad about Uwe Boll?

> Having never seen a Uwe Boll movie, can someone tell me what's so bad about him?

Perhaps this review [agonybooth.com] of his version of Alone in the Dark will be instructive (as well as entertaining).

The REAL reason he's quitting

Boll is actually quitting because the German government recently closed the tax loophole [cinematical.com] that allowed Boll and other German filmmakers to set up their "films" as tax shelters for businessmen (with no intent of ever making any money). The gravy train has dried up and the scam is over.

A Challenge

Bad move. Never challenge geeks. We'll always find a way to overcome.

Re:A Challenge

Oh of course. We stopped OOXML's ISO fast-tracking cold.

just let him be

I don't get it. Why petition the guy to stop making movies? Maybe his movies will be quickly forgotten, maybe they'll be cult classics 50 years from now. As long as he manages to finance them somehow and stay in business, who cares? If you don't like his movies, do what I do: just don't go.

Re:just let him be

I don't get it. Why petition the guy to stop making movies? Maybe his movies will be quickly forgotten, maybe they'll be cult classics 50 years from now. As long as he manages to finance them somehow and stay in business, who cares? If you don't like his movies, do what I do: just don't go.

You're missing the point. As long as he's in the business, no one's favorite videogames are safe from being turned into horrible movie adaptations, preventing decent adaptations from ever being made. It's self defense. ; )

Re:Does he know about Teh Internets?

To be fair, if the list does hit one million, he'll just claim fraud. And based on your comment, he'd actually be right.

Way to go! Uwe Boll will continue making video game movies, even if the petition reaches one million signatures -- and it'll be YOUR, peragrin's, fault.

(Granted, I don't expect him to stop even if the petition does hit one million unique, verifiable signatures, but still, I'll blame you.)