20 Recent Movies That Were Sent Out To Die

8. The Pout-Pout Fish

Considering the popularity of The Pout-Pout Fish picture books and the mere $10 million budget of this animated adaptation, it probably shouldn't have had too much trouble turning a profit theatrically.

Yet U.S. distributor Viva Pictures simply failed to market the Nick Offerman-starring film despite releasing it in almost 2,000 cinemas, and so it went on to gross just $5.4 million - barely half its impressively tiny budget.

Even with the film's undeniably cheap-looking animation, the beloved source material and not-bad critical reviews should've been enough to make it a success, if only audiences actually knew it was coming out.

But Viva absolutely shot themselves in the foot here by releasing The Pout-Pout Fish in the shadow of Pixar's far more high-profile and better-reviewed Hoppers, which sucked all the oxygen out of the room for a whole month.

Working with a popular IP is one thing, but you still need to make sure that people who like said IP know that you made a movie out of it.