It's Uwe Boll who's got the last laugh?
What few seem to realize is that Uwe Boll runs an accounting firm disguised as a production company, and not a production company interested in making good films. Of course his goal is to make money, just not with his product. It’s all a gimmick to take advantage of German and Hollywood loopholes and tax laws. And he gets to have fun pretending he's a director.
Know of any other director who makes such god-awful schlock that never made a profit and who still manages to get millions from investors to start his next project before the last is out of postproc? No one ever questioned why he specializes in video game adaptations?
It’s all about tax incentives and breaks. Hollywood studios, for quite some time, purposefully back and put out money-losing crap to finance other projects and to pad their profits. These studios are mega machines; they don’t care about art, it’s all about the bottom line across all their holdings, and they’ve found ways to push wins and losses across divisions, subsidiaries, one-time production companies, and foreign investors and out-of-country production investments in order to maximize the profit on their billions of dollars.
The US imposes some restrictions to qualify for some benefits, such as filming location and percent of local crew used, but Germany has no such restrictions and offers plenty of freedom for the wealthy wanting to increase their buck by investing in a film.
For an individual investor, as silly as it sounds, past a certain earning level and with a good accountant, you can actually make more money by giving some away... Movies offer more potential than humanitarian causes, since, depending on the deal, the return on the investment can come from other streams, placement deals, etc., not subject to the same tax laws. Don't forget, these wealthy dudes in on this usually own various companies and media outlets.
Boll, with his Boll KG production company headquartered in Germany, but also operating out of Hollywood, offers a way to take advantages of loopholes for investors on both sides of the pond. The stuff Boll makes in Germany and only for a German audience loses even more money than his “mainstream” US-based projects and he still gets plenty of funding. And it’s funny that his more successful films like “Rampage” were pulled out when they were just shy of breaking budget.
Boll is to Hollywood what Athene is to YouTube and gaming: business men making great money by acting like totally annoying arses and trolling the public, managing, by exploiting Internet dynamics, to garner a cult following of naive people as well as active haters that give them the necessary attention such an enterprise needs to be truly successful and generate revenue streams that don’t figure against production costs.
Comparing Boll to Ed Wood is unfair. At least Ed Wood loved movies and sacrificed all to make them. Uwe Boll only loves money and fame, even if gained through infamy. People like Athene and Boll are, unfortunately, a product of this new Internet culture.
Ignorance is bliss... 'til it posts on the Internet; then, it's annoying.