Top 12 Film Industry Stories of 2012: #12
Oogie Fever Not Contagious
By David Mumpower
January 2, 2013
BoxOfficeProphets.com
What in the world is Oogie fever? Your confusion is understandable because there is no such thing. It was the intended outcome of a well-intended children’s film. The title in question, The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, was produced with the expressed idea that the theatrical experience should be an interactive one for children. After all, they are going to sing and dance and hopefully not cry in the aisles anyway. Why not go with it?
This is a reasonable conclusion and an excellent idea, creatively speaking. Children have smart toys in their grimy little hands before they learn to walk. Sitting still for a period even as brief as 80 minutes can be a laborious experience for a kid. Parents do not pay for multiple tickets in order to bore their children. Instead, this is a commercial bribe wherein if the adults pay strangers money, the unspoken agreement is that the children will be entertained. Once the bribe is paid, parents i.e. consumers expect theater owners i.e. suppliers to hold up their end of the bargain.
There is a second half to this agreement. Theater owners are not so much suppliers as middlemen. Movie producers lease them products that they are entitled to exhibit theatrically for a set period of time. The catch is that these products are expected to entice consumers into, you know, going to a movie. A children’s film should be, you know, appealing to children. This is why the global cure for Oogie fever is important.
Let’s back up a step. Part of the reason theater owners lease a product is because the suppliers have fostered trust over a period of time. Take for example famed children’s programming producer Kenn Viselman. This man is an engrossing figure due to the fact that he has ties to a pair of iconic television series, neither of which he created. The first is Thomas the Tank Engine, a program for which Viselman was initially hired to market merchandise.
Over time, Viselman attained a respectful reputation behind the scenes and leveraged this into becoming a power broker in the toy industry. He became something of a legend at The itsy bitsy Entertainment Company before his position was usurped. He was the man who created what he now describes as a myth, the prank that caused the entire world to believe that one of the Teletubbies was gay.
Viselman’s company owned the United States rights to the BBC production. In order to create a media splash, he posited in 1999 that Tinky Winky must be gay since his outfit was purple. You know the rest. In the early days of the internet, there were only two reasons why a person would Google the word purple: Monica Lewinsky’s dress or Tinky Winky’s sexuality. And Lewinsky’s dress was really blue so it shouldn’t count.
What separated Viselman was a rare ability to find the strongest method to sell toys. With each Thomas the Train Engine or Teletubbies piece of merchandise sold, his reputation grew. And there are few markets that mean more to the backbone of the economy than toy sales. Anyone who excels there is a voice of great import, particularly to Hollywood.
Enter Kenn Viselman Presents…, a fledgling distributor that has released – and presumably will release – exactly one movie. That title is The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure. And among wide releases, it is statistically the biggest bomb in the history of the industry with regards to tickets sold per location.
2,160 exhibitors agreed to give Kenn Viselman the benefit of the doubt. The reason why is obvious. Given his track record of overwhelming success in toy sales, Viselman was as pedigreed as any first time producer in the history of the industry. If any newbie is ever going to enter the movie-making business and immediately achieve popularity, it would be Viselman. Alas, the immortal words of William Goldman remain true. “Nobody knows anything.” Viselman’s candidacy may look good on paper but in execution, his failure is total.
On August 29, 2012, The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure was released into theaters. I mention this because nobody else noticed. Those 2,160 exhibitors attained a paltry $102,564. This is an average of $47 per location. And I want to clear on what this number represents. The movie did not earn $47 per exhibition. The $47 is an all-day total. So, a theater running the film four times daily earned less than $12 per screening. Yes, the average daily showing of The Oogieloves sold fewer than two tickets on average. Everywhere in North America!
The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure eventually earned $443,901 during the course of its opening weekend. Its weekend per-theater average of $206, while a modest step up from the $47 on Wednesday, still entered the record books as the WORST debut ever for a movie distributed in at least 2,000 locations. And here is the worst part. Oogie fever suffered from frontloading.
Because of the movie’s dishonorable opening weekend, theater owners were understandably reticent to continue exhibiting the feature. After all, the deal mentioned above presumes that the middle men entice consumers in order to sell them overpriced popcorn and congealed nachos. The Oogieloves were not bringing in the kiddies.
After earning $670,253 in its first five days (August 29th being a Wednesday), the movie proudly presented by Kenn Viselman grossed only $395,654 during the rest of its domestic run. Yes, almost two thirds of its entire domestic take was accrued during its first five days in theaters, those days representing previously unimaginable box office failure. Despite debuting in 2,160 locations, The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure barely cleared a million dollars during its theatric run.
Each year sees its fair share of box office failures. To wit, this is not the only such catastrophe earning a spot in this year’s Top 10 Film Industry Stories. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure is still different. It has earned a place in the annals of box office lore due its unprecedented ticket sales issues. Kenn Viselman is one of the greatest toy salesmen of our era, and his ideas were sound in theory. In execution, Oogie fever is one of the worst box office implosions ever. After only one day in theaters, it was already a punchline for the ages. That will not be changing any time soon. We are already seeing the word Oogie used as a verb to indicate a box office bomb.