Laika’s “Wildwood” took about $4.3 million on its opening Friday, including roughly $1 million from Thursday previews. Deadline put the day at $4.2 million from 2,942 theaters. The film is pointing to an opening weekend of $11 million to $14 million. For a PG-13 original fantasy from an independent studio, released without a major studio behind it, that is a strong start.
How it compares
The Friday number sits close to the studio’s best debuts. “Kubo and the Two Strings” opened at $4.1 million, “Coraline” at $4.5 million, “ParaNorman” at $4.6 million and “The Boxtrolls” at $4.9 million. “Missing Link” managed only $1.6 million. Deadline noted that the weekend projection is not far from the $13 million debut of DreamWorks and Universal’s “Forgotten Island.” An opening of $11 million to $12 million would match the $12.6 million launch of “Kubo” in 2016, though it would fall short of the studio’s record, $17.3 million for “The Boxtrolls.”
A smaller distributor takes the lead
Earlier Laika films went out through larger companies such as MGM and Focus. This time the film is with Fathom Entertainment, a Denver-based company with far fewer resources, and Laika is handling its own marketing. Fathom did well by the studio before: its 2024 re-release of “Coraline” earned more than $51 million worldwide. Now it has the main event.
Forecasts were scattered. Boxoffice Pro projected $6 million to $10 million, Box Office Theory went as low as $4.5 million to $9.5 million, and some optimistic reports eyed $15 million to $21 million. The film landed in the middle. Travis Knight, the studio’s president and CEO and the film’s director, was frank about the gamble. “We are an independent company, so it’s a lot to bear,” he said, calling it “a grand experiment” that might fall flat.
Word of mouth
Reception is doing much of the selling. The film earned an A CinemaScore, tying the studio’s best audience grade, plus a 100% critics’ score and a 98% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Premium large formats are delivering about 15% of the weekend. The West accounts for 32% of the gross, against a norm of 26% for other movies, and the top location so far is the AMC Burbank at $29,000. That points to a more specialized crowd than a typical family release draws.
What it took to make
Knight calls the film his life’s work and says it is Laika’s most expensive, though he will not give a figure. “We do more with less, and we always have,” he said. The production ran 231 weeks and involved more than 1,000 people. The 233 handmade puppets came with hundreds of thousands of replacement faces, and the crew built 132 practical sets, including 728 miniature trees of 10 species native to the Pacific Northwest. The film adapts Colin Meloy’s 2011 fantasy novel.
TheWrap reports that the budget is said to be well above $100 million, so the film will not turn a profit for the privately owned studio. Laika is funded in a patron-style arrangement by the fortune of Nike founder Phil Knight, Travis Knight’s father. Final weekend numbers arrive Sunday, with Monday actuals to correct the estimates.
Sources
- Laika's 'Wildwood' Scores a Strong Opening Day at the Box Office, Keeping Pace With the Studio's Classics Despite a Small Distributor
- Laika, LLC
- ‘Wildwood’ Director Travis Knight on Spending 16 Years to Create His Stop-Motion “Masterpiece”
Photo: Thierry Sollerot from Vernon (Eure, Hte Normandie), FRANCE (CC0)
