A Method To Uwe Boll's Madness

grandfenwick writes "Ever wonder why Uwe Boll keeps getting bigger budgets and bigger-name actors for his awful film adaptations of videogames? Stuart Wood of Cinema Blend theorizes in an exposé on Boll's methods. His position? Thanks to a loophole in German tax laws, he and his investors actually make *more* money the more a movie tanks at the box office." From the article: "Boll's movies aren't being made out of a love for cinema. They are a shallow exercise in money-making greed and exploitation. Rich Germans getting richer by exploiting the stupidity of the Hollywood system and the naivety of critics like us, who never thought to question the true motives of why these horrible, horrible movies existed. Pure and unfiltered 21st century capitalism." Take with a grain of salt.

Comments

Makes little sense...

[Parity]

See, the way a tax write-off works is, if I throw $1,000,000 into a tax-deductible expense, then I don't pay taxes on that $1,000,000. So, I'm out my $1,000,000 but being in the 40% tax bracket, I save $400,000. But that's still $600,000 that I've lost with no compensation other than seeing my name in the credits of a really bad movie.

Maybe there's another thing involved besides straightforward tax deductions, but the situation wasn't explained very well.

Possibly what he's meant is that if you invest $1 million you don't pay taxes on that $1 million (because it's deducted) and you only pay taxes on returns from that $1 million that are in -excess- of $1 million. (If by 'returns' he means return-on-investment, ie, net profits, and not box office returns, ie, gross profits, that could be what he's trying to say). So, if I make a movie that exactly breaks even then I'd get all my money back -and- not pay taxes on it. In which case it's not true that you make money by tanking at the box office, but by breaking even. It would also be a really, really dumb way to write a tax law, but such dumb laws -have- been written before when trying to 'stimulate investment'... or by corrupt legistlators. I just wouldn't expect to see anything that dumb in a first world nation in this century.

Anybody out there know anything about german finance laws?