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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.
This article explains it in better detail than I ever could:
http://www.slate.com/id/2117309/
Within the studios, this is common knowledge. It's the reason why Hollywood movies never turn a profit, as a rule. Every now and then you hear a story about how someone got screwed by agreeing to take less up front for a share of the profits. (Most recently, Peter Jackson is suing New Line for cooking the books on the LotR movies.)
Hollywood accounting is like Enron strung out on crystal meth. All the sliminess with twice the crazy.