After its inauspicious opening Wednesday, when the bizarre kiddie flick The Oogieloves in the BIG Balloon Adventure earned a shockingly low $47 average at each theater, it looked like it could be headed for the worst opening weekend of all time for a film playing in over 2,000 theaters.

Well, it happened.

According to studio estimates, the colorful toddler-targeting entry, which is being distributed by Kenn Viselman Presents (Viselman formerly found massive success as producer of The Teletubbies), earned a truly awful $448,131 from 2,160 theaters in its debut three-day weekend.

That gross yielded a per theater average of $207. Yes, you’re reading that correctly: $207!

Just how low is that? Let’s pretend that the average ticket price for each customer was about $7 this weekend. That would mean that only 30 people saw Oogieloves at each theater — across all its showings — over the past three days.

The film, which stars a series of creepy costumed characters with names like Toofie, Zoozie, and Goobie, as well as a vacuum cleaner named J. Edgar (and not to mention Jamie Pressly, Cary Elwes, Christopher Lloyd, and Toni Braxton, whose heart will never unbreak now), cost $20 million to produce, and another reported $40 million to promote. Was the marketing money well spent? Judge for yourself in the trailer below:

Oogieloves steals the opening weekend “record” from Delgo, the misguided 2008 animation, which earned only $511,920 in its opening weekend from (cue scary Phantom of the Opera chord progression) 2,160 theaters — the same number as Oogieloves. There’s gotta be some sort of curse around that theater count.

Now, let me turn this hilarious story (if you’re a box office nerd like me) over to you, readers. Did you even know Oogieloves was coming out? Were you possibly one of the people who saw it this weekend? Are you surprised it bombed this badly?

For more box office analysis, follow Grady on Twitter: @EWGradySmith

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