3% on Rotten Tomatoes? Uwe Boll's Making a Sequel Anyway

A 3% score on Rotten Tomatoes would end most directors' relationship with a franchise. For Uwe Boll, it's apparently just the starting point for a sequel.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Boll has begun production on 23 Years Later: The Castle of the Dead, a spiritual successor to his 2003 film House of the Dead, which was based on the Sega arcade series. Long-time collaborator Michael Roesch is co-writing, and Jonathan Cherry and Ona Grauer, who starred in the original, will return. Principal photography is set to start on September 5.

Boll's motivation for coming back? Paul W.S. Anderson. Anderson has been working on an officially licensed House of the Dead reboot in collaboration with Sega, and Boll apparently took that as a personal challenge. "When I heard that Paul Anderson is rebooting House of the Dead, I immediately knew that it would be a soulless CGI orgy," Boll told The Hollywood Reporter. "And I want to do a completely different zombie movie: Bloody, gory, and handmade." I respect the audacity of a man whose most famous film sits at 3% on Rotten Tomatoes calling someone else's work soulless.

Roesch offered this insight into the plot: "We're upgrading from a house full of zombies to a castle full of zombies." The film's title is, of course, 23 Years Later: The Castle of the Dead, so that's less of a reveal and more of a reading comprehension exercise. Boll also confirmed he's optioned the film rights for another Alone in the Dark movie from THQ Nordic, so this isn't a one-off return.

For anyone who grew up with Sega's light-gun shooters, Boll's name is permanently fused to the memory of Hollywood treating game adaptations as disposable tax write-offs. He was doing it long before the current wave of actually good video game films, and he was doing it badly on purpose, or at least that's what his filmography strongly suggests. Whether a spiritual sequel to a film nobody asked to revisit finds an audience in 2026 is anyone's guess, but Boll has never needed an audience to make a movie. A release date for the film hasn't been announced.