‘The Oogieloves’ has the worst opening weekend of all time

K. Thor Jensen Contributing Writer, Entertainment

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Good. They should all burn in Hell. I don’t know if you know this about me, but I have kids. And kids loooove to see really crappy movies. But when a movie looks so bad that even kids won’t see it, you know you have something really special.

The trailer for The Oogieloves In The Big Balloon Adventure freaked me out when I first saw it. I wasn’t even high, this thing is just that weird. The movie was put together by Kenn Viselman, a TV producer who made a crap-ton of money by bringing Teletubbies and Thomas the Train to America. Dude was at a Tyler Perry movie, saw folks yelling at the screen, and thought “Bingo! A movie where kids can yell at the screen!” And thus the Oogieloves were born, three big-headed puppet people who went on a sub-verbal adventure to track down some missing party balloons. The flick cast a perplexing assortment of human co-stars, including Toni Braxton, Christopher Lloyd and Cary Elwes.

Despite Viselman’s pedigree, nobody in their right mind thought this would succeed, even opening on a dead end-of-summer weekend. But the final tally was even worse than expected, making The Oogieloves the new record holder for lowest earnings in a movie opening in over 2,000 theaters. Running out the math is instructive and depressing, as BoxOfficeMojo shares:

The movie earned $443,901 from 2,160 locations this weekend; that tops 2008′s Delgo ($511,920) for the worst debut ever for a movie in more than 2,000 theaters. It also had the second-worst per-theater average for a movie in nationwide release at just $206. To put that in perspective, if each location played Oogieloves five times a day on one screen at an average ticket price of $7, that would translate to fewer than two people per showing.

Fewer than two people per showing in each theater, and at least one of those people would have to be a parent. Imagine how depressing being alone in a theater watching this would be. I’d commit suicide in front of my kid, easy.