All right, I’m going to get to the top five in a little bit, but first: We have to talk about The Oogieloves In The BIG Ballon Adventure. WE HAVE. TO TALK. ABOUT THE OOGIELOVES.
Okay. So. By now, you’ve probably heard about how The Oogieloves is breaking records for the worst opening weekend ever for a movie on more than 2,000 screens, earning only $448,000. Ever since the news broke, I’ve been scouring the Internet for info on the movie, and I think I’ve compiled a pretty accurate list of why this movie failed so spectacularly:
- Marketing: The only marketing I’ve seen for this movie has been on TMZ. I repeat: They marketed this movie, for babies, on TMZ. Actually, the awesome part was that they did so during Prince Harry’s nude photo scandal, so just imagine this tableau playing out: “Prince Harry in nude romp with whores! Courtey Stodden flooded with porn offers on her 18th birthday! Go see The Oogieloves In The BIG Balloon Adventure! Lindsay Lohan punches a baby in the mouth!” Either the guy in charge of marketing this movie is some kind of deranged genius, or he’s just deranged.
- The Movie Itself: From what I can tell, this movie is about three Lovecraftian terrors trying to find five balloons for a pillow’s birthday after their vacuum cleaner loses them because he’s trying to bang their sentient window. I’m not kidding, that’s the actual premise of this movie. One character loves science, one character is a girl, and one character’s pants keep falling down. Just putting this out there, but if your protagonist’s entire characterization can be summed up as “Unable to afford a belt”, you suck at writing.
- It Encourages Your Kids To Act Like Douchebags: One of the biggest “selling points” of the movie is that it encourages your kids to shout at the screen and run around and dance. Except that these are all the things that you’re NOT supposed to do in a movie. Actually, I really have to bring something up real quick here: This is how the movie’s creator justified this decision, taken from the Wikipedia page:
“…when he went to a showing of the Tyler Perry film Madea Goes to Jail, he saw how people in the audience would shout out advice to the characters on screen.”
Yes, that was the creator of The Oogieloves using negative stereotypes to justify writing a kids movie encouraging your kids to be dicks.
What’s that? You want to hear about the other movies now? All right, fine.
- The Possession earned $17.7 Million, despite being less terrifying than The Oogieloves.
- Lawless earned $9.6 Million, probably because Shia LaBeouf didn’t get high on LSD and have sex on camera.
- The Expendables 2 earned another $8.8 Million from dads everywhere who still think Arnold Schwarzenegger can take a dump without breaking a hip.
- The Bourne Legacy earned $7.2 Million despite not even having a Bourne in it, the lying douchebags.
- ParaNorman, the only movie worth seeing, only earned $6.5 Million because the American movie-going public is terrible.