Why video game film adaptations used to suck and don’t anymore | Uwe Boll interview

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Uwe Boll has been contemplating a tough question lately. Why are video game adaptations like the Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Last of Us on HBO taking off now? And why didn’t they take off when he was making them a decade ago?

And the question for us is this: Did we need to have Uwe Boll before we had these recent successes? Don’t get us wrong. We’re not making fun of Boll. He had a passion for video games and he saw an opportunity to bring them to the big screen. He also made a profit on his razor-thin budget movies.

Boll is known for making House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, Postal, Far Cry, Dungeon Siege, BloodRayne, BloodRayne 2: Deliverance, BloodRayne: The Third Reich and many more. I talked to him about the rising trend of Hollywood and games, and what’s happening as gaming subculture is becoming mass culture. Critics were not kind. Alone in the Dark has a 1% review score on Rotten Tomatoes, while his highest score is 40% for They Wait.

I discovered that Boll returned to his love of original films in the past decade. In February, he revealed he was making First Shift, a crime drama starring Kristen Renton (Sons of Anarchy) and Gino Anthony Pesi (Shades of Blue).

Boll said that he was trapped in a way by the times. Hollywood executives had no respect for games, and they gave him shoestring budgets to do his work. In one case, a game based on the plot for his Alone in the Dark movie was canceled, and fans thought his movie was just making up new stuff and disrespecting the original game. And yet he tried to master the craft.

I found it instructive to talk to Boll, since I’m always trying to