Succeeding In Failure

I consider myself something of a film buff so, like every other movie critic, I often guess how certain movies will do at the box office. Much like when I try and predict which TV shows will meet an early demise, I want to see how well I do in guessing what the American public is anxious to go see. It is not that I wish anyone failure, it is just that I like to keep my prognostication skills sharp. So, you can imagine my surprise this week when I heard about a movie called "The Oogieloves in the BIG Balloon Adventure" not having a particularly strong opening. Actually, 'not particularly strong' is putting in mildly - it had the worst opening in the history of cinema for a movie being released on this scale. The film opened in over 2,000 theaters and made less than $450,000. That works out to be $207 per theater. (When you factor in the price of a movie ticket that means about 25 people were in each screening. No word on how many of them were there against their will.) I'm pretty sure "The Avengers" is still pulling in more than that per theater and that movie has been out for about three months now. Still, the most messed up part about this story is that the producer of "The Oogieloves" is happy about this.

But before we get to that we need to go back to the fact that I had never even heard of this movie or these characters before I read this article yesterday. Apparently "The Oogieloves" is some sort of trippy kids show, much like "The Teletubbies". Now, you could easily argue that I was not the intended audience for this movie and that is how I never knew it was coming out. However, if a kids show is being properly marketed there is no escaping it. For example, everyone knew who the Teletubbies were, no matter how hard they attempted to escape them. Those furry bastards were getting into your skull whether or not you had small children in your family to act as carriers. For comparison, my family currently has five kids under the age of 6 running around and I've never heard of these Oogieloves, even in passing. Also, this movie somehow had a $20 million budget and features actual talented people like Cary Elwes, Cloris Leachman, Chazz Palminteri and Christopher Lloyd. (Note to anyone who worked on this film: I recommending running to a movie set and taking any job you can find, because you do not want this as your last IMDB credit.) Allegedly this movie also had $40 million budgeted for promotions and marketing, but I think whoever wrote those checks should demand a refund.

Now, back to the issue at hand - producer Kenn Viselman being thrilled at this bomb. Apparently, Viselman comes from the "there is no such thing as bad publicity" school of thought. He said he had been hoping that by being so bad people in the media would start talking about the film in a way that he couldn't generate before it got to theaters. So far you can't argue with his logic. After all, plenty of movies go out and under-perform - they just get swept away by something better and hope for some big numbers when the video is available for rental. But when you bomb to the point of it being historic, well, now you are on to something. Just being bad is boring. It takes a certain kind of train wreck to be dubbed as the worst of all time. I certainly didn't see Google News links to stories about the so-so returns for "The Bourne Legacy" or the "Total Recall" reboot. Still, I'm not sure this was the best way to market the film and I do not believe this was the studio's intention all along. I can only imagine that as the release date got closer and they came to grips with the fact they were going to have a failure on their hands they pulled back all the marketing and hoped to bomb quietly. It was only after they knew just how historically bad they had done that they came up with their, "This was our plan all along" strategy when talking to the media.

What I will be interested to see is how the movies does in week 2 (if there are even theaters still willing to show it.) I wouldn't be all that surprised if it did much better, because as a society we have a fascination with trainwrecks. It's why the "Teen Mom" franchises do so well. We watch just to be able to say, "Well, at least I'm not them." I'm sure there are some people out there who are planning to go to the theaters and see what all the non-buzz is about. Sure, they will mostly people people who took some sort of hallucinogen before heading to the theater, but as long as they can hold it together long enough to hand the correct amount of money to the person at the ticket booth than their money is as good as the next guy's. Plus, you can't argue with the notion of this movie quickly becoming some kind of cult classic. If the fact that you can still buy "H.R. PufnStuf" DVDs teaches you nothing else, it is that people love to watch psychedelic kids shows when they are high. I fully expect that by the time my nieces go to college an "Oogieloves" poster will be the easiest way to figure out which room the kid wearing the hemp pants is living in. Just cross your fingers they aren't your child's roommate.