Video game adaptations are quickly becoming the next big thing in Hollywood, with movies like “A Minecraft Movie” and “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and TV shows like “Fallout” and “The Last of Us” all finding massive success. That’s a trend that no one would have predicted a couple decades ago, back when the very notion of a video game movie conjured thoughts of low budgets, lousy reviews, C-list actors, and box office deficits.
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Back in those golden days, no one was more infamous for his video game movie flops than controversial German filmmaker Uwe Boll. Throughout the aughts, Boll threw up bomb after bomb, adapting games like “Alone in the Dark,” “Dungeon Siege,” “BloodRayne,” “House of the Dead,” and “Far Cry.” He’s arguably the man most responsible for the hellish reputation of video game movies at the time. In 2007, Boll directed “Postal,” based on the game series of the same name that began in 1997. A discount “Grand Theft Auto” ripoff with all of the violence and none of the tact, “Postal” was prime Boll material, and the film, unsurprisingly, fell completely flat. “Postal” made just under $150,000 on a reported budget of $15 million. But that didn’t stop Boll from trying to crowdfund a sequel nearly 20 years later.
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In September 2024, Boll and cohort Gary Otto launched an Indiegogo campaign seeking $2.5 million for a “Postal 2.” The only problem, aside from Boll’s heinous track record, his pariah status in the film industry, and the fact that the first movie was a total disaster? He apparently didn’t have the rights to make a second adaptation in the first place.
Uwe Boll’s Postal 2 campaign was a total disaster
The Indiegogo page for Uwe Boll’s “Postal 2” is no longer available to view, as the campaign was suspended and all pledges refunded. Presumably, that’s because of the response from the games’ developers, Running with Scissors, who claimed to have no knowledge of the project. In other words, Boll was trying to crowdfund a sequel to a movie that was universally panned based on a franchise he no longer had the rights to adapt.
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According to a PC Gamer report at the time, the film’s Indiegogo page declared that making “Postal 2” was “almost a duty for the freedom of art, speech and life,” claiming the usual, tired goal of fighting back against “political correctness” and “woke and cancel culture.”
Supposedly, Boll was pointing to sharp wit and cultural incisiveness of the first “Postal” movie, which is full of things like Holocaust jokes, the most tired gay stereotypes, and people defecating on camera. Truly, a brave artistic experiment. It’s a tragedy that we won’t be seeing its sequel crawling to cinemas to hemorrhage even more money in the future.
Maybe Boll will have more luck with that “Dark Knight” movie.
