Bomb City: The Legend of 2012

Oogieloves
[adrotate banner=”1″]2012 is long gone now, and despite it being an amazing year for cinema, there were some duds and some thuds. SO get out your suds and wash off the stink of these 2012 box office disasters!

Where would we be if the world didn’t have The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure? Probably with plenty of lunar colonies. Even though Oogieloves came out in August, it retroactively set mankind back decades. The brainchild of a marketing genius who decided to give the world a movie where 1 year olds could interact with the screen while their parents paid attention to their iPhones, the concept failed to catch on as any child older than 3 instantly got bored, and all children younger got bored after 30 minutes or so. It flopped hard, making just $445,000 in its opening weekend. Oogieloves beat out Delgo as the record setting worst box office performance for a film opening in over 2000 theaters. Oogieloves finished with just over $1 million gross, costing $20 million and spending $40 on marketing.

2012 saw the unfortunate trend of more right wing documentary propaganda at the theater, with 2016: Obama’s America tearing up the box office and a plethora of bandwagon documentaries and awful 1/3rd novel adaptations following in the footsteps: Occupy Unmasked, Atlas Shrugged Part 2, Hating Breitbart, and Runaway Slave. We detailed this mess with it’s own post filled with all the horrible details

Reprehensible garbage Won’t Back Down was pure anti-teacher union propaganda from Walden Media and Philip Anschutz, and thankfully crashed and burned. It had the worst opening for a film released at 2,500+ theaters with $2.6 million, and barely made double that by the end of its run.

Nickelodeon’s odd tween flick Fun Size became a trick and not a treat when it crashed at the box office, the third worst opening for a film with 3000+ theaters in history. The $4.1 million is still shockingly high for a film that couldn’t deicde if it was a kids movie or an adults movie.

Chasing Mavericks is another 2012 flick with a terrible opening. I knew it would bomb from the increasingly desperate invites to free screenings I was getting. It finished 11th worst for 2000+ theaters, with $2.6 million. Gerald Butler almost died making this film. Just think about what his legacy would have been.

Now let’s go to the lowest of the lows. The Ghastly Love of Johnny X earned just $117 during it’s one week run, making it the lowest grossing movie of the year. Of course, the press declared Playback starring Christian Slater the lowest grossing film of the year, but it make a whole $264. But The Ghastly Love of Johnny X has no former big names to rag on in the press, and spending ten seconds checking facts is hard, so the Playback story got copy/pasted on movies sites throughout the web. Thanks for showing just why web movie reporting is awful, guys!

What about John Carter? That legendary bomb that cost Disney $200 million still made a respectable $73 million in the US and $209 million more worldwide, which in any other world would be a hit. Think about how much money it would have made had it been advertised at all and still called John Carter of Mars (dammit!)

The TV movie homefront saw Home Alone 5 and Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor in Lifetime’s Liz & Dick.

Probably the worst thing that appeared in 2012 was the animation abomination Foodfight!, which got a European DVD release and soon was on YouTube giving Americans an aversion to food. After 11 years (and a do-over after a hero stole the original film!) the best they could come up with was one of the worst things ever made.

Will 2013 continue 2012’s proud tradition of shattering records? We shall see…we shall see..

Foodfight! will make you hate animation, food


[adrotate banner=”1″]Look at that! Just look at it.

Foodfight! is a name animation fans hear about once every two years, get confused about where they heard it, see and remember the images and promo trailer, and then laugh and laugh until the film news disappears for another two years. But the joke will finally be on us, as Foodfight! inches closer to getting a legitimate release. On DVD. In Europe.

For those of you who might be unfamiliar with Foodfight! (which is probably a lot of you as Foodfight! is really obscure), here is the story. In 2000, Larry Kasanoff decided he could do animated movies better than Pixar. So he got in a car with his buddy and drove around until they found an idea. I guess his wife also had him pick up some milk, because the idea turned out to be a supermarket, and all the products coming alive during the night. It was a detective story where Dex Dogtective and friends like to dance and have fun at the Copbanana club, until the mysterious Brand X moves next door. Kasanoff got a bunch of companies to pay for product placement (Charlie the Tuna, Mr. Clean, Cap’n Crunch, Chester Cheetah, Twinkie the Kid, the Energizer Bunny, the Brawny paper towel guy, and many more) and Threshold Entertainment was born! Foodfight! was targeted for a 2005 release (with distribution by Lions Gate), and Kasanoff was quoted bragging about how his animators were networked from all over the globe. There was also going to be a 3D animated prequel series called Foodfight!: The Adventures of Dex Dogtective.

But 2005 came and went with no release. 2006 came and went with no release. Fall 2007 was announced as the release time, but that also came and went with no Foodfight! In 2010, merchandise for Foodfight! was found at a store, but the film was still AWOL and no one had heard a peep since 2007. That article is also great because some of the animators show up to describe their experiences and about how little of the film was completed. According to the stories, the hard drives containing the film’s files were stolen in Christmas 2002.

Eventually, things fell apart even more, and in 2011 you could purchase what was completed of the film at auction! It looks like Boulevard Entertainment was the lucky winner, paying around $2.5 million (for a film rumored to have $50 million production costs) and dumping this thing on DVD. With a website that says “©2012 Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company.” Surely, quality, quality stuff.
Foodfight
Quality.

So let’s quote the official site to bloat up this article even longer:

Charlie Sheen, Hilary Duff, Eva Longoria and Christopher Lloyd lend their unmistakable voices
to this computer-animated tale of a supermarket that ‘springs to life’ after the doors have been locked
and the workers have all gone home. When the lights are turned out chaos reigns for the ‘products’ in
this grocery store. The grocery store transforms into a city, and from every door of this city comes
two types of characters: well-known marketing icons and new characters…

This full-length CGI Movie features character/products including; Dex Dogtective (Charlie Sheen),
Sunshine Goodness (Hilary Duff) and Daredevil Dan (Wayne Brady). They all hang out at the Copa-
Banana in the produce section, but trouble is brewing within this bustling metropolis. When the villainous
Lady X (Eva Longoria) arrives in town with her Brand X minions, the brand-named products start to get
a little hot under the label. As sleuthing U.S.D.A. (United Supermarkets Defense Association) –
Dex Dogtective teams up with flying stunt squirrel Daredevil Dan and the beautiful Sunshine Goodness
to uncover the truth about these unmarked invaders, it begins to appear that the only way to fend off
the dreaded Brand X is to engage them in an all-out, no-holds-barred FoodFight!…

(please note that this is the second official site, as Threshold Entertainment’s original site is as dead as the dream to make Pixar 2.0 is.)

One thing that is weird is seeing who was hot way back in 2000, and knowing what their careers have done since then. Some have had almost as crazy a ride as Foodfight! I do think that Sunshine Goodness will become a cult figure among crazed furries, so they got that going for them.

Stories about Foodfight! dating back to 2000!
AWN
FastCompany
AnimationMagazine
CartoonBrew

Foodfight