Bloodrayne
Rate Movie[Total: 63 Average: 1.2]
- Directed By: Uwe Boll
- Written By: Guinevere Turner
- Release Date: January 6, 2006
- Domestic Distributor: Romar Entertainment
- Cast: Kristanna Loken, Michael Madsen, Ben Kingsley
Box Office Info:
| Budget: $25 million | Financed by: 3rd Boll KG |
|---|---|
| Domestic Box Office: $2,405,420 | Overseas Box Office: $1,244,855 |
“It’s like a $25 million dollar movie and it blows! I mean, it’s like the worst movie ever made.”
–Screenwriter Guinevere Turner
Uwe Boll cemented his place in the legendary halls of bad filmmakers, after helming two video game adaptations that scraped through the bottom of the barrel — House of the Dead and Alone In The Dark and he continued his Ed Wood quality streak with Bloodrayne. Boll raised $47 million in 2004 for a private film fund, 3rd Boll KG, which under a now defunct (and illegal) German tax shelter loophole, allowed wealthy individuals to invest for a huge tax write off and the fund paid for this picture. The budget for BloodRayne was $25 million.
A newly formed distribution company from Billy Zane (who also had a supporting role in Bloodrayne) and James Schramm called Romar Entertainment brokered a deal with Boll to distribute in the US. ‘Filmmaker Uwe Boll’ + ‘distributor Billy Zane’, what could possibly go wrong? Boll raised $20 million of the $22 million P&A costs for Romar and the pic was dated for January 6. Boll and Romar had an agreement to book Bloodrayne wide in about 2,000 theaters and Romar claimed to have secured 1,915 theaters. Romar completely botched the release, sending out hundreds of film prints to theaters that they never closed a deal with. After suing Romar, Boll said, “I cannot say that [Bloodrayne] was a big success in the movie theatres. I tried it with a new theatrical distribution company, and they were not able to lock in all the theatres – that was the biggest problem we had. We were scheduled to go out on 2000 screens, and then we came out on 930 screens, and only shitty screens, so it didn’t work out.”
It was actually estimated that Bloodrayne was booked to play on 985 shitty screens, though there are reports that a few hundred theaters never even played the film, due to some sort of miscommunication with Romar. BloodRayne was not screened for critics and opened against Hostel, which would completely devour whatever little audience there was for Bloodrayne and also the low budget Grandma’s Boy opened.
Bloodrayne pulled in a disastrous $1,550,000 — placing 19th for the weekend. The film promptly lost most of its theater count and played in 340 theaters in its second frame and sank 81.4% to $288,801 and was pulled out of release at the end of its third week with just $2,405,420. Independent distributors like Romar receive only a small percentage from major theater chains (Regal Cinema only pays out 34% to smaller labels, for example), so they saw back under $1 million, which would not even cover the cost of striking release prints. Zane and Schramm quickly closed Romar’s doors and haven’t distributed another film.
The film pulled in just $1.2 million overseas across a few distributors and $1 million of that was from Russia and it went straight to video in most major markets — including Germany. Modest home video sales were apparently enough to spawn two cheap direct to video sequels.
Don’t get mad at me. But I actually liked this Tik