'Oogieloves' sets wrong kind of box office record - 13abc.com Toledo (OH) News, Weather and Sports

As the summer movie season draws to a close, we've got box office champions like "The Avengers" and "The Dark Knight Rises" ... and then we've got question marks like "The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure."

The newly released kids film, which features giant "Teletubbies"-esque creatures along with stars like Jaime Pressly, Cloris Leachman and Toni Braxton, has set the bar for low performance having earned just $674,000 since it opened last Wednesday.

The film even earned the title of the worst opening weekend of all time for a wide release arriving in 2,000-plus theaters, pulling in just $448,000 in its first three days, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com.

Created by Kenn Viselman, the same fellow who introduced the Teletubbies to the U.S., the Oogieloves are happy-go-lucky characters - with names such as Zoozie, Toofie and Goobie - who are meant to be an upbeat counterpoint to what Viselman sees as darker themes in popular kids films from Pixar, he told the Los Angeles Times.

"Why can't we have something that's all love, where we don't even have the color black?" Viselman inquired during the interview. "Pixar always has the triumph of good over evil. But why does there have to be evil in the first place?"

While the obvious answer might be because that's what's drawn in audiences, among other things, Viselman insists that a profit wasn't his point anyway.

The film, which cost a reported $20 million to produce and another $40 million to market, employs an interactive element that encourages kids to sing and dance along in an effort to let "kids ... be free."

"Look, it hurts your ego when you're one of the worst openings in history or whatever it is," Viselman told the L.A. Times. "But this was never about box office - it was about creating entertainment kids could love."