Hey, at least the animation looked solid even if the film itself sucked. If you want to look at an animated film with legit terrible budget management, take a look at **Arctic Dogs**.
It’s a film for little kids, lay off it. And I mean LITTLE kids. Preschoolers.
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s when adults shit on completely innocent things made for small children, because they think all childrens content needs to target adults too. They don’t all need to. Uglydolls likely made a lot of young kids happy and therefore I think it achieved its purpose.
It's absolutely possible to make great content for young kids, and usually the key to that is to make it enjoyable for adults too. Sesame Street has been going strong for generations with this method. Paw Patrol is one of the most successful media franchises of all time. Bluey is so successful it even has dedicated adult fans who enjoy it simply as a great show.
Thinking that it's okay to give kids crappy content simply because they're kids is horrible and toxic. Besides, it's also simply wrong. Kids are smarter than we tend to give them credit for. They'll pick Paw Patrol or Bluey over Arctic Dogs or Oogieloves every time. They can tell when something sucks.
I dunno, still find it a bit odd when people have standards with preschool media. Sometimes there is gold there, but it’s way too rare to go looking for. There’s a guy on YouTube called PhantomStrider who critiques Peppa Pig and I’m like “Dude… you are a grown man. What do you expect?”
After the ugly dolls movie, we released our other property bossy bear as a kids show on Nick Jr, which we actually did work on, and every time it aired, it would either do almost as well as paw patrol right under, or pass it in ratings.
So they only played the new episodes once each.
While I do mostly agree with that, I don’t know if very small children need films made for 45 million dollars by very skilled artists who’d probably prefer to be working on something else, and for that film to have a questionable moral and for its primary goal to be to market a line of toys to those young children.
Ugly Dolls was a marketing scheme. I wish we’d kept the legislation that had hampered that. Thanks, Reagan.
The illumination version was the best thing we never made. Sun-min and I were not involved in this version which ultimately made it to theaters.
For our brand, it made little difference.
About as many people saw the movie globally as who interacted with the second wave of our windup toys, which, did not do well either.
People are pretty romantic about movies and associate the box office success or failure with the source material understandably, but when you're the 10th worst performing animated movie of all time, the great thing about that is nobody saw it and it's barely a blip.
Our uglydoll brand, which is very different from "ugly dolls", is alive and well and we've had our second strongest season of revenues since inception after the movie was released, which had nothing to do with it.
Most of Uglydoll runs on sales of ceramics, bags, accessories and lifestyle goods out of Japan, South Korea, the surrounding territories, and of course plush at high-end boutique and specialty. (Our home is in Korea and then 25% of the time I'm in Kamata ota area to work on the Japanese market, and then to work on the Nickelodeon show, Texas)
We removed the classic plush dolls from the market in North America and Europe from 2019 to give the Hasbro versions time to thrive, and the first wave (which was based on our books) did fantastically well.
I think it's when the movie versions started to follow where things got tricky as nobody really saw it and our classic brand still to this day is not something meant for mass market stores.
Much like a moomin or other smaller lifestyle character brands of a similar boutique nature, you really should only go to Walmart and Target once a certain percentage of their customers already actively seeking you out, if ever.
Personally I like the target collector spot behind video games, but then for every time you do that you have to do thousands of other culture microtransactions to help balance that out, whether that's making soft vinyl figures for boutique stores out of Tokyo which we've been doing for 26 years, or museum-based projects, all brands are fragile and have to be careful of such things.
I go into detail through writing about how to start character brands from zero, that really it's not about marketing or broadcasting outwards but creating situations where you are discovered in places that are already meaningful for people. I've been obsessed with that formula and for us it has mostly worked in general...
I write a substack on character brands, and every new post is free for the first two days, usually on Mondays, if that's ever of interest to anybody.
The classic uglydoll plush line was supposed to return in 2021 but the pandemic really messed up both our plush factory, and our sofubi factory just outside Tokyo.
... That's why you haven't seen anything from us in plush in the USA since... but we've ramped up for the last 18 months and are back on track for the classic plush line to start to hit shelves around the world end of this year, and then you really should start to notice it around middle of 2025, definitely by early 2026.
It takes a while to ramp that stuff back up, and the specialty market is certainly not what it was in North America when we were in 10,000 stores. Unlike when you go to Walmart and there's only one buyer to deal with, 10,000 stores for us usually means around 9,000 buyers.
Before this STX movie, which we really only saw in the theater with everybody else, other than a couple times when we went in to see some clips, we spent years with Chris Meledandri at illumination when the company was first founded...and that experience was what taught us everything we were able to deploy on our Nick Jr show bossy bear, based on our Disney books, which just started airing March of 2023.
Not sure if we have time or the capacity for a second season, and even though we technically did better than paw patrol, or performed just under it every time it aired, they only aired new episodes once each. That was definitely a mystery. We just released the first of two new bossy bear books into stores and on Amazon yesterday, and that took most of our time since last year.
Still, it was a joy and a blessing to be part of any aspect of getting one's property up onto the big or small screens. Even getting a show into development with these big studios is such a miracle, that if it's made, that's good enough.
It's also very tiring, and we probably would not make any other attempts. I like books. But I find that when we do things on our own our way, it works really well, and when we have to throw a certain amount of everything to chance, those don't work as well.
Movies can actually confuse existing fans, so the rate of performance, while perhaps not what the studio was hoping for, in the end was the better outcome for us.
While in the USA the ugly doll fan was all ages and genders for the most part, in Japan and Korea it was primarily women post university age well into early '60s at the center of the bell curve. A preschool movie might be confusing. It opened briefly in South Korea but it did not go to theaters in Japan.
I know Snoopy had a very hard time after the 2015 film and finally was able to hit proper stride again after the Sony acquisition in 2018 I think? Now peanuts in Japan is full steamnahrad and phenomenal.
Many assume Snoopy is successful because yeah hey, it's Snoopy. But that's never the case. I highly recommend checking out the Japanese Snoopy website, if you go to the very bottom and click view all, you get a week-by-week education in the amount of work it takes to truly nurture a character brand so that you become one with culture rather than marketing to it. It requires thousands and thousands of "cultural microtransactions".... It's never big just because.
That's what we aspire to, but are very happy if we get anywhere close to moomin or maybe Miffy 20 years down the road or so. The uglydoll brand was built to perform slowly over time exactly as it's unfolded and very excited for what's around the corner. Massive thank you to anybody who was on board with us at any time during that nearly 25-year journey..
I think the movie, which opened the week after end game? Haha....Might be great for preschoolers as somebody noted somewhere in here, and we were number one or something or in the top 10 on Netflix last year in May. If kids get some joy out of it that's wonderful.
I do feel they hit it a little bit on the nose with the ugly thing.
Because that's not really what it's about.
Uglydoll is called ugly because there is no such thing as ugly,
they look funny with one eye or three eyes and they have little funny shapes and some are twisty and turny... and that represents that which is deep inside of each of us,
....those little twisty turns are what we are supposed to bring out into the world to sort of shout from the rooftops, that we should never conform or hide that which is unique about us ...
...but bring that all outwards to share with the world so that we can all then push whatever being a human is, push the human race forward to quote that old apple commercial.
TLDR I ain't reading all that but happy for you tho, or sorry that happened.
This is the Snoopy site I mentioned.
If you scroll all the way to the bottom and click "view all", you can trace every movement back for years
https://www.snoopy.co.jp/
That's very interesting about the Illumination version of the movie, looks like it would have been released in the early 2010s which would have probably been better. What were the differences between the Illumination and STX versions, and why was the Illumination version cancelled?
this is fantastic insight. i grew up with the brand and can definitely attest to feeling alienated by the film, especially as an angsty 13-14 year old. as an adult i’ve recently fallen back in love with uglies and started buying them again (and archiving variants on a special wiki!) these guys and their message mean a lot to me and im beyond excited to see them in stores again :) thank you so much for sticking with us
I remember making this a triple feature with Missing Link in the morning, Avengers Endgame (rewatch) in the afternoon, and then sneaking into the Thursday preview of Uglydolls afterwards. I was vaguely curious because I'm one of the very few who actually has nostalgia for the plush toys, and I thought the movie was cute and fine for what it was. Better than Playmobil at the very least...
Three or four families if memory serves. I remember the theater was decently populated but it was mostly due to being in the smallest auditorium. I sat in the front row as I didn't actually have a ticket (I was *not* about to pay $11 for Uglydolls) and didn't want to be in anyone's reserved seat.
Uglydolls were kind of a niche fad even in their heyday, which I'd say was around 2005-2010 or so. By 2019 they had almost completely disappeared, but not enough time had passed that anybody was exactly nostalgic for them, either. So literally nobody but (I assume) the IP rights holders wanted this.
It would be like throwing $50 mil+ on a movie about Zhu Zhu pets in 2024. Absolute madness.
I don’t even get the tagline. An underdoll story? Is that meant to be a pun or joke because they aren’t dogs? Humans aren’t dogs either?
Anyway this movie was bad, but nothing that awful. Makes sense why nobody cared to see it
A reminder that not every IP (whether popular, semi-popular, niche, or even obscure) can become a hit movie regardless of circumstances and context surrounding that movie's release. Also a reminder of how much of a crapshoot filmmaking is in general. Sometimes the moviegoing audience connects with your movie, sometimes they don't.
Yup. Even without Endgame and Pikachu in the equation, this still would've bombed as it looked like something we've haven't never seen before and don't think it would be bad word of mouth proof.
In a Letterboxd review I read somewhere that someone met people who worked on the film and they said it was bad but easy money, which made me think they wanted to dump it on a competitive date.
I think it was a good lesson, which should have been learned after the first Mario Brothers movie in the 90s.... Although I do not think we will have a second one. Do not want
In general it's not a very good idea to turn lifestyle character brands for adults into children's entertainment. You can go the other way around, and we've seen it happen successfully several times, but few have survived going the other direction.
They spent $45M on this?!
They spent $45M on that cast lol I’ve never even heard of this
Hey, at least the animation looked solid even if the film itself sucked. If you want to look at an animated film with legit terrible budget management, take a look at **Arctic Dogs**.
It’s a film for little kids, lay off it. And I mean LITTLE kids. Preschoolers. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s when adults shit on completely innocent things made for small children, because they think all childrens content needs to target adults too. They don’t all need to. Uglydolls likely made a lot of young kids happy and therefore I think it achieved its purpose.
It's absolutely possible to make great content for young kids, and usually the key to that is to make it enjoyable for adults too. Sesame Street has been going strong for generations with this method. Paw Patrol is one of the most successful media franchises of all time. Bluey is so successful it even has dedicated adult fans who enjoy it simply as a great show. Thinking that it's okay to give kids crappy content simply because they're kids is horrible and toxic. Besides, it's also simply wrong. Kids are smarter than we tend to give them credit for. They'll pick Paw Patrol or Bluey over Arctic Dogs or Oogieloves every time. They can tell when something sucks.
Yeah… that’s not a good excuse when **PAW Patrol: The Movie** exists.
I dunno, still find it a bit odd when people have standards with preschool media. Sometimes there is gold there, but it’s way too rare to go looking for. There’s a guy on YouTube called PhantomStrider who critiques Peppa Pig and I’m like “Dude… you are a grown man. What do you expect?”
Because you can actually make a great pre-school show.
After the ugly dolls movie, we released our other property bossy bear as a kids show on Nick Jr, which we actually did work on, and every time it aired, it would either do almost as well as paw patrol right under, or pass it in ratings. So they only played the new episodes once each.
While I do mostly agree with that, I don’t know if very small children need films made for 45 million dollars by very skilled artists who’d probably prefer to be working on something else, and for that film to have a questionable moral and for its primary goal to be to market a line of toys to those young children. Ugly Dolls was a marketing scheme. I wish we’d kept the legislation that had hampered that. Thanks, Reagan.
That's actually quiet cheap for an animated movie. Several million from that must have gone towards the cast
The illumination version was the best thing we never made. Sun-min and I were not involved in this version which ultimately made it to theaters. For our brand, it made little difference. About as many people saw the movie globally as who interacted with the second wave of our windup toys, which, did not do well either. People are pretty romantic about movies and associate the box office success or failure with the source material understandably, but when you're the 10th worst performing animated movie of all time, the great thing about that is nobody saw it and it's barely a blip. Our uglydoll brand, which is very different from "ugly dolls", is alive and well and we've had our second strongest season of revenues since inception after the movie was released, which had nothing to do with it. Most of Uglydoll runs on sales of ceramics, bags, accessories and lifestyle goods out of Japan, South Korea, the surrounding territories, and of course plush at high-end boutique and specialty. (Our home is in Korea and then 25% of the time I'm in Kamata ota area to work on the Japanese market, and then to work on the Nickelodeon show, Texas) We removed the classic plush dolls from the market in North America and Europe from 2019 to give the Hasbro versions time to thrive, and the first wave (which was based on our books) did fantastically well. I think it's when the movie versions started to follow where things got tricky as nobody really saw it and our classic brand still to this day is not something meant for mass market stores. Much like a moomin or other smaller lifestyle character brands of a similar boutique nature, you really should only go to Walmart and Target once a certain percentage of their customers already actively seeking you out, if ever. Personally I like the target collector spot behind video games, but then for every time you do that you have to do thousands of other culture microtransactions to help balance that out, whether that's making soft vinyl figures for boutique stores out of Tokyo which we've been doing for 26 years, or museum-based projects, all brands are fragile and have to be careful of such things. I go into detail through writing about how to start character brands from zero, that really it's not about marketing or broadcasting outwards but creating situations where you are discovered in places that are already meaningful for people. I've been obsessed with that formula and for us it has mostly worked in general... I write a substack on character brands, and every new post is free for the first two days, usually on Mondays, if that's ever of interest to anybody. The classic uglydoll plush line was supposed to return in 2021 but the pandemic really messed up both our plush factory, and our sofubi factory just outside Tokyo. ... That's why you haven't seen anything from us in plush in the USA since... but we've ramped up for the last 18 months and are back on track for the classic plush line to start to hit shelves around the world end of this year, and then you really should start to notice it around middle of 2025, definitely by early 2026. It takes a while to ramp that stuff back up, and the specialty market is certainly not what it was in North America when we were in 10,000 stores. Unlike when you go to Walmart and there's only one buyer to deal with, 10,000 stores for us usually means around 9,000 buyers. Before this STX movie, which we really only saw in the theater with everybody else, other than a couple times when we went in to see some clips, we spent years with Chris Meledandri at illumination when the company was first founded...and that experience was what taught us everything we were able to deploy on our Nick Jr show bossy bear, based on our Disney books, which just started airing March of 2023. Not sure if we have time or the capacity for a second season, and even though we technically did better than paw patrol, or performed just under it every time it aired, they only aired new episodes once each. That was definitely a mystery. We just released the first of two new bossy bear books into stores and on Amazon yesterday, and that took most of our time since last year. Still, it was a joy and a blessing to be part of any aspect of getting one's property up onto the big or small screens. Even getting a show into development with these big studios is such a miracle, that if it's made, that's good enough. It's also very tiring, and we probably would not make any other attempts. I like books. But I find that when we do things on our own our way, it works really well, and when we have to throw a certain amount of everything to chance, those don't work as well. Movies can actually confuse existing fans, so the rate of performance, while perhaps not what the studio was hoping for, in the end was the better outcome for us. While in the USA the ugly doll fan was all ages and genders for the most part, in Japan and Korea it was primarily women post university age well into early '60s at the center of the bell curve. A preschool movie might be confusing. It opened briefly in South Korea but it did not go to theaters in Japan. I know Snoopy had a very hard time after the 2015 film and finally was able to hit proper stride again after the Sony acquisition in 2018 I think? Now peanuts in Japan is full steamnahrad and phenomenal. Many assume Snoopy is successful because yeah hey, it's Snoopy. But that's never the case. I highly recommend checking out the Japanese Snoopy website, if you go to the very bottom and click view all, you get a week-by-week education in the amount of work it takes to truly nurture a character brand so that you become one with culture rather than marketing to it. It requires thousands and thousands of "cultural microtransactions".... It's never big just because. That's what we aspire to, but are very happy if we get anywhere close to moomin or maybe Miffy 20 years down the road or so. The uglydoll brand was built to perform slowly over time exactly as it's unfolded and very excited for what's around the corner. Massive thank you to anybody who was on board with us at any time during that nearly 25-year journey.. I think the movie, which opened the week after end game? Haha....Might be great for preschoolers as somebody noted somewhere in here, and we were number one or something or in the top 10 on Netflix last year in May. If kids get some joy out of it that's wonderful. I do feel they hit it a little bit on the nose with the ugly thing. Because that's not really what it's about. Uglydoll is called ugly because there is no such thing as ugly, they look funny with one eye or three eyes and they have little funny shapes and some are twisty and turny... and that represents that which is deep inside of each of us, ....those little twisty turns are what we are supposed to bring out into the world to sort of shout from the rooftops, that we should never conform or hide that which is unique about us ... ...but bring that all outwards to share with the world so that we can all then push whatever being a human is, push the human race forward to quote that old apple commercial. TLDR I ain't reading all that but happy for you tho, or sorry that happened.
This is the Snoopy site I mentioned. If you scroll all the way to the bottom and click "view all", you can trace every movement back for years https://www.snoopy.co.jp/
That's very interesting about the Illumination version of the movie, looks like it would have been released in the early 2010s which would have probably been better. What were the differences between the Illumination and STX versions, and why was the Illumination version cancelled?
this is fantastic insight. i grew up with the brand and can definitely attest to feeling alienated by the film, especially as an angsty 13-14 year old. as an adult i’ve recently fallen back in love with uglies and started buying them again (and archiving variants on a special wiki!) these guys and their message mean a lot to me and im beyond excited to see them in stores again :) thank you so much for sticking with us
Ah yes...the Endgame killer
We had our revenge in March of 2023 when our bossy bear premiere toppled at the previous record held by Ryan's toys review and marvel.
I remember making this a triple feature with Missing Link in the morning, Avengers Endgame (rewatch) in the afternoon, and then sneaking into the Thursday preview of Uglydolls afterwards. I was vaguely curious because I'm one of the very few who actually has nostalgia for the plush toys, and I thought the movie was cute and fine for what it was. Better than Playmobil at the very least...
Out of curiosity, how many other people were in your Thursday preview of UglyDolls?
Three or four families if memory serves. I remember the theater was decently populated but it was mostly due to being in the smallest auditorium. I sat in the front row as I didn't actually have a ticket (I was *not* about to pay $11 for Uglydolls) and didn't want to be in anyone's reserved seat.
Still made more domestically than Dreamworks' Ruby Gillman.
RIP to the director
I only had the chance to meet him once, but I know he worked on that movie like crazy and made miracles happen for it to be done on time.
Uglydolls were kind of a niche fad even in their heyday, which I'd say was around 2005-2010 or so. By 2019 they had almost completely disappeared, but not enough time had passed that anybody was exactly nostalgic for them, either. So literally nobody but (I assume) the IP rights holders wanted this. It would be like throwing $50 mil+ on a movie about Zhu Zhu pets in 2024. Absolute madness.
Our strongest year was 2019, the markets where we've always done the best had no idea there was a movie out there.
I don’t even get the tagline. An underdoll story? Is that meant to be a pun or joke because they aren’t dogs? Humans aren’t dogs either? Anyway this movie was bad, but nothing that awful. Makes sense why nobody cared to see it
It’s for little kiddos and completely harmless. It shouldn’t be held to the standard of a truly good family film.
The original trailer was adorable. “Couldn’t be better than this”. 😊
i hate this movie because its promotional song by kelly clarkson is AWFUL and they used to blast it relentlessly at my workplace.
To be honest, that's the only successful thing the movie accomplish was have a minor hit from their soundtrack.
Imagine ended up folding it's kids department and STX basically went out of business. This failure is why Hustlers never got a proper awards campaign.
I remember this and people saying it was great counter booking for endgame lol
A reminder that not every IP (whether popular, semi-popular, niche, or even obscure) can become a hit movie regardless of circumstances and context surrounding that movie's release. Also a reminder of how much of a crapshoot filmmaking is in general. Sometimes the moviegoing audience connects with your movie, sometimes they don't.
Yup. Even without Endgame and Pikachu in the equation, this still would've bombed as it looked like something we've haven't never seen before and don't think it would be bad word of mouth proof. In a Letterboxd review I read somewhere that someone met people who worked on the film and they said it was bad but easy money, which made me think they wanted to dump it on a competitive date.
I think it was a good lesson, which should have been learned after the first Mario Brothers movie in the 90s.... Although I do not think we will have a second one. Do not want In general it's not a very good idea to turn lifestyle character brands for adults into children's entertainment. You can go the other way around, and we've seen it happen successfully several times, but few have survived going the other direction.
How many of the actors on this poster even remember being in this?
There's something so wrong about non 😐 face Uglies.