Watch on YouTube: Wildwood – final trailer
There is a particular kind of film-industry tragedy in which everybody agrees you have made something wonderful and then nobody turns up. Laika’s Wildwood is currently starring in one. Travis Knight’s stop-motion adaptation of Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis’s novel holds 100% with critics on Rotten Tomatoes, 98% with audiences, and an A CinemaScore from the people who did go. According to TheWrap’s Saturday estimates, it took $4.3 million on its opening day in the US from 2,752 locations and is heading for an opening weekend of around $11 million to $12 million. The budget is said to be well above $100 million, and TheWrap says flatly that the film will not turn a profit. Fifteen years in development, 9,000 hand-made feathers on one eagle, and the box office has responded with the enthusiasm of a cat offered a bath.
Knight has had quite the year. His live-action Masters of the Universe reached cinemas in June and made $113 million worldwide, before doing a great deal better once it landed on Prime Video, where Gizmodo reported 1.17 billion minutes viewed in its first week. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter this week about Wildwood, Knight was unusually candid about what happened to He-Man. “Its life on streaming was much more important to Amazon than its life in the theaters,” he said. “It’s not something I understood going into it. I wanted their faith in us as filmmakers and in the movie to be rewarded in a way that wasn’t to my hopes and expectations.” He still thinks the film “deserved a better fate than it got”. THR reports that Amazon insiders say the studio weighs “the complementary value of theatrical and streaming” when it greenlights a project, which is the corporate way of saying that Skeletor was always meant to end up on your telly.
So that is one director with two films in five months that people liked and that did not earn their keep in cinemas, for two quite different reasons. He-Man was a big franchise film that its own studio seemed happy to treat as a streaming launch. Wildwood is a handmade fantasy with no franchise at all, and it is struggling to find an audience even with critics on its side.
Laika’s fans will recognise the second problem, because the studio has been living with it for seventeen years. Coraline opened in the US to $16.85 million in 2009 on a $60 million budget and took its time becoming a classic; re-releases have since pushed it to $188 million worldwide. ParaNorman opened to $14 million, The Boxtrolls to $17.2 million, and Kubo and the Two Strings, which may be the best of the lot, to $12.6 million, finishing on $77.5 million worldwide against a $60 million budget. Then Missing Link, which cost $100 million, opened to $5.9 million in 2019, the worst start in Laika’s history, and the studio did not release another feature for seven years. Wildwood‘s weekend will roughly match Kubo‘s, which would be fine if it had cost Kubo‘s money. It did not.
It is not hard to see why Laika keeps going regardless. The studio is backed by Phil Knight, Travis’s father and the co-founder of Nike, who has been funding it since the Portland studio was rebuilt out of Will Vinton’s old claymation house in 2005. Most animation studios answer to shareholders. Laika answers to one very patient man who sells trainers. The arithmetic of stop-motion is brutal: years of work, a second or two of finished film per animator per week, and no cheap way to make a sequel. And the family audience that once went out for any animated film now mostly turns out for the next instalment of something it already knows. Wildwood is also Laika’s first PG-13 film in America, which may have made some parents of small children think twice.
Because the rest of the weekend was decent for genre cinema. DC’s Clayface is leading with an estimated $24 million from 3,458 locations, on a reported budget of $40 million, with an A- CinemaScore. A budget-conscious body-horror film from a British director (James Watkins) has done respectably, which is the most useful thing the new DC has learned since Superman. Wicker, the Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård fantasy romance, is projected to take $6 million with 94% from critics. Lower down, Street Fighter fell 73% in its second weekend to $8.4 million, giving it $46.7 million in the US against an $82 million budget. Meanwhile, the real money went to A24’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, which rose 28% in its second weekend to $20 million. In 2026, apparently, the most terrifying monster at the box office is a Silicon Valley start-up.
All of these are Saturday estimates and will move a little when the Sunday and Monday figures come in. None of the reports so far gives international numbers for Wildwood, which is in British cinemas now and could yet find a longer life overseas and over Christmas, as Coraline did. The test for Laika is whether its patron still thinks the bills are worth paying. The test for Hollywood is whether “everyone loved it and nobody went” is a story about one film, or about what sort of films still get made at all.
Our earlier pieces: Wildwood’s fifteen years and nine thousand feathers, Mark Kermode on Masters of the Universe, and the Clayface review-embargo row in our Offworld Report. Sources: TheWrap, The Hollywood Reporter and Gizmodo.
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