A projectionist from UltraStar Cinemas has revealed to Shacknews a rather huge error made with the distribution of Uwe Boll's latest cinematic endeavor, the BloodRayne adaptation featuring such well-regarded thespians as Ben Kingsley and Michael Madsen. The UltraStar employee explained that when he got into work last week, he noticed that the theater had received a copy of BloodRayne. This seemed odd because his particular theater generally shows films aimed more at the arthouse set. "I didn't want to build this and put it in my theater," he said, so he checked up with UltraStar higher-ups. It turns out that a computer error resulted in the print being sent to 5,500 more theaters nationwide than was intended. "The computer that placed the order, instead of selecting just the correct theatres, it also selected 5,500 additional theaters, so they made that many extra copies." Whoops.

I asked how much each print costs, and he said that in total, it costs about $5,000 to have each set of reels delivered to a theater, meaning that as a very rough estimate the total costs incurred may be upwards of $27 million. "And that's 27 million that didn't go into production, didn't go into marketing, it's just expenditure that's sitting there," he said. "I mean, I know Ben Kingsley was in Ghandi, but nobody gets to just throw away that much money for nothing."

The situation is exacerbated by the fact that, according to Variety, the film is only showing on 985 screens, just over half of the original target of 1,900--and that's separate from the thousands of accidental extra copies. Now, the film is already millions in the hole and it earned only $1.2 million during its opening weekend, failing to place it in the top ten. Uwe Boll has had a lot of second chances, but might this spell the beginning of the end for the self-described misunderstood director?