Wildwood is a roughly $100M bet that critical love can beat the box office

What do you do with a film critics are calling a masterpiece when forecasters expect it to open at around $10 million? That is the question hanging over Laika's Wildwood, and it's a more interesting one than the usual "will it flop?" panic.

The setup: Wildwood opened October 23 as a stop-motion epic directed by Travis Knight. It runs 131 minutes, it is Laika's first PG-13 film (per Wikipedia), and it is released by Fathom Entertainment rather than a traditional major studio. Bloomberg says it is forecast to bring in just $10 million in the US and Canada in its debut, against what Yahoo's box office rundown describes as a budget "said to be in the $100 million range."

The real risk is the ratio, not the opening

Even if that reported figure is the right one, the math is ugly. Yahoo points out that Laika's movies "have never really been big draws at the box office," and the projected debut is between $5 and $10 million. In our view, that means Wildwood starts its run needing a long, patient audience rather than a big first weekend.

This is also a kind of film that can't cut corners. A handcrafted, frame-by-frame epic is expensive by nature, and you can't shave costs by rendering faster. The studio is selling a very large object to an audience that has to buy tickets right away.

Then there's what the film does to itself. Yahoo says the runtime over two hours and the PG-13 rating will both make it harder to turn a profit. We'd go further and guess that it means fewer family-friendly showtimes and a narrower pool of parents willing to bring younger kids. We admire the ambition, since a darker, longer fairy tale is exactly what animation should dare to attempt. But admiring a creative choice and underwriting it commercially are different things.

Critics are in love, and that may not be enough

The reviews are glowing. Gold Derby's headline calls it Laika's Oscar front-runner and "one of the most astonishing animated movies ever made." Yahoo reported a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes as of October 15. Not everyone is swooning: IndieWire's headline says the epic "lacks" something, though the review still calls it "a mind-boggling visual smorgasbord on a scale that Laika has never attempted before."

We think that split is healthy, and telling. A film can be a marvel of craft and still be harder to love than Coraline. Prestige gets you awards chatter and think pieces. On its own, it doesn't pay for a production this size.

History offers a cautionary tale and a glimmer of hope. Yahoo cites Missing Link, Laika's 2019 film, which opened to $5.9 million and finished at $26.5 million worldwide. The hopeful comparison is Migration, which recovered from a $12.4 million opening to reach $300.1 million worldwide. But that was a December release with legs, and Yahoo calls repeating the feat in October "a big, borderline unprecedented ask." Wildwood also opens against DC Studios' Clayface, which Yahoo says is favored to win the weekend with $20 to $29 million.

Fathom is the most interesting part of the bet

The distribution choice may be the smartest and the scariest part. Fathom is best known for re-releases and live events in theaters, but it has history with Laika: according to Yahoo, its 2024 Coraline re-release grossed over $52 million worldwide, lifting the film's lifetime total to $188 million. When the release date was announced in January, Scott Mendelson wrote that we should expect a conventional wide release of roughly 2,500 to 3,500 theaters.

So Laika is betting that its fans, the Coraline crowd, will show up as they do for an event. Honestly, we like that logic. It treats the studio as a brand with a loyal following rather than a cog in a major's slate. But it is also an unproven test of whether Fathom can open a new film wide, and an expensive one to run as an experiment.

Our verdict

Go see it in a theater, especially if you care about stop-motion surviving as an art form at this scale. The reviews suggest it is worth it, and opening weekends are the vote that matters most to the people who greenlight the next one. As for the box office, our guess is a financial disappointment, with long-term value coming from awards and library life. That may be an acceptable fate for a film this ambitious. It just isn't a sustainable business model, and Wildwood is risky enough at the size the reporting actually supports.