Fred is headed to television.

In a first-of-its-kind deal for the children’s entertainment business, Nickelodeon is betting that a Web phenomenon – a tantrum-throwing 6-year-old named Fred Figglehorn – could blossom into a franchise. “Fred: The Movie” will debut on Nickelodeon this summer, the cable network plans to announce on Wednesday as part of its upfront ad presentation.

“We’ve been tracking Fred for a long time our audience seems to be consumed with him – Fred love shows no sign of subsiding,” said Cyma Zarghami, Nickelodeon’s president. “Fred is not unlike SpongeBob. He’s a relentless optimist and our audience gets the joke.”

Lucas Cruikshank, a 16-year-old from Nebraska, created Fred about four years ago. Since then, the character has become a hit on YouTube. In aggregate, his videos have been viewed over 400 million times. Fred’s whiny voice strikes a lot of adults as fingernails on a chalkboard, but children fall on the floor laughing.

Hollywood in recent years has raced to mine the Internet for raw talent capable of crossing over to traditional platforms like movies and television – the places where the real money is still made. But those efforts have largely failed. Can Fred and Nickelodeon pull it off?

The director-producer Brian Robbins (“Norbit,” “Varsity Blues”), United Talent Agency and a management company called the Collective sure think so. Mr. Robbins and the Collective financed “Fred: The Movie” with a budget in the low seven figures and filmed the project in December. Then they started shopping for a distributor, with a particular eye on a theatrical release.

That effort proved futile, but the deal with Nickelodeon might be a better result. As part of the deal, Ms. Zarghami committed to a second Fred movie. Mr. Robbins said one idea is a Christmas-themed follow up.
“My goal is to turn Fred into a franchise and a brand and this is a great result – in part because we get that Nick branding and parent approval,” he said.