Since I've already been called out for being petulant this week, I thought I'd do a follow-up on Uwe Boll's whinefest from yesterday where he takes a few swipes at his critics, just as I've taken a few swipes at those trying to let the air out of the tires of my favorite defenseless lovelorn zombie, Stubbs.

Aside from his complaint, most likely valid, that many who criticize his films haven't actually seen them (a sure bet for films that don't succeed at the box office, I'd imagine) Boll also suggests the following series of logical propositions as a counter-argument (click read more from front page for the complete article):

1. People are logical.
2. My films are bad, according to critics.
3. People continue to give me money to make films.
4. Logical beings would not continue to give money to someone to make bad films.

Since obviously assumptions 1-4 cannot all be simultaneously true, he offers to remove #2 on the grounds that the critics are wrong and his films aren't actually bad.

I'll admit right up front I'm not in a position to make a suggestion either way as I've never seen one of Boll's films either; nor have I ever made any statements about them one way or the other, except to say that since I've never read a good word about them said by anyone other than Boll himself, that it'd probably be a good thing if the Halo project had nothing to do with him, which so far seems to be coming true.

What I find interesting in this interview is that the solution this inexplicable contradiction which seems to bother Boll, the idea that even though there seems to be a massive conspiracy against him and his films, people keep giving him money and projects, is right there in front of him, he just refuses to see it:

Apparently Boll is "number one in the market" as far as paying investors back goes, and that's "Not because I make the best movies on earth, but I make movies for a minimal amount of budget compared to what major companies are spending, and the movies look good, and they go out theatrically, and they make a lot of money on DVD or Pay TV.

Boll says it's tough to get his movies on screens in the UK and France, to give a couple of examples, but they do very well in cinemas in Spain, Italy, Russia, Thailand and the Middle East, generally spending a few weeks in the top ten of the box office charts.

"This is the main point - if the movie is really, really bad, why are a hundred territories buying it?"

They are buying it because whether content is bad or good is not always the deciding factor in purchasing content.

One thing I've noticed watching TV in the former Soviet Union is the proliferation of Spanish-language soap operas produced in South America. There are a lot of them.

Why? Because of the high proportion of Spanish-language minorities? No. There are hardly any. Because of their high quality? No.

Because they are cheap and TV stations need to fill the airwaves with something or else they can't sell advertising. Boll seems to walk right up to the idea that his movies can manage to make a decent and reliable profit despite being terrible because they are cheap, and enough people will either have not heard that it is bad, or are willing to take a small risk to find out for themselves, or are a captive audience somewhere with no recourse to premium content.

A lot of Pay TV outlets are hotels. Stay in enough budget hotels and you'll notice that a lot of the films available are not top-notch. Since Boll's films were cheap to make, the rights can also be sold cheaply, and someone can count on enough lonely on-the-road salesmen with nothing better to do expensing a few bucks on a cheesy action-horror flick to make it worthwhile buying the rights.

None of this has anything to do with the movie being good.

The other thing Boll wonders is why the game companies don't get behind his films. The reason there is obvious. They don't want their franchise associated with his film. Perhaps those most directly involved with promoting or developing the games weren't the ones who had authority to decide who would direct the film. They may have sold the rights for extra cash as a matter of course, knowing full well that lots of properties never end up turning into films at all. For many videogame franchises, that would probably have been preferable to having Boll make it into a movie, given the negative press they have produced to date.

The whole idea of turning these franchises into films is the idea of making a cheap buck; the idea that very little promotion is actually necessary to get enough eyeballs to turn a profit if your production costs are low enough. If you manage to acquire a property that already has a built-in audience because people know it already-- like a game property-- then there's that much less money to spend and that much more profit to keep. That the game studio feels no need to promote a project that has no interest in being good, and only wants to be cheap, even though it actually costs as much if not more than a good game-- Boll quotes figures around 15 to 20 million-- is anyone really surprised? Can Boll himself be surprised?