Critics gave LAIKA's Wildwood 100%. LAIKA films keep getting raves and flopping anyway

When the Wildwood embargo lifted on October 11, the stop-motion epic debuted at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from its first 20 reviews — the first perfect score in LAIKA's history and, per ComicBook, the highest-rated animated feature of the decade. Variety called it "a spectacular success"; TheWrap called it "so ambitious and intricate that it's hard to even fathom."

Then there's the other column. The film reportedly cost around $100 million, and the trackers can't even agree on the size of the shortfall: Boxoffice Pro projects a $10–15 million opening, while Box Office Theory's figure cited by SlashFilm is $5–10 million. Either number makes the weekend's best-reviewed release its underdog — Clayface, opening the same day, is projected at $20–29 million.

This has happened five times before

Wildwood is LAIKA's sixth feature, and the first five established the pattern the r/boxoffice thread is bracing for. Every one of them — Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, Missing Link — was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar. None was a hit.

The bookends tell it: Coraline, the studio's biggest success, made $125 million worldwide in 2009 and needed a 2024 re-release (another $52 million) to show how much latent love was out there. Missing Link won the Golden Globe and opened to $5.9 million, finishing at $26.5 million worldwide.

"It really is sad that Laika creates so many well-received movies and they mainly always flop […] the constant audience rejection of their movies pokes holes in the 'just make good movies and audiences will support them' argument"

— a commenter on r/boxoffice

That's the uncomfortable part of this release: Wildwood is a controlled experiment on the industry's favorite comfort phrase. A beloved studio, a perfect score, a Colin Meloy novel with a built-in readership, a voice cast with Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Tom Waits and Awkwafina — if quality alone sold tickets, this is the movie that would prove it.

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The variables working against the thesis

• The distributor: this is Fathom Entertainment's first first-run LAIKA release — a company known for one-night events and anniversary screenings, not sustained theatrical campaigns.
• The rating and runtime: PG-13 and over two hours, which complicates the family matinee business animated films live on.
• The date: October 23 belongs to Clayface and Halloween-season horror, with family audiences being saved for Hexed a month later.

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The people who've seen it are already doing word-of-mouth triage. An early-access viewer in the same thread kept it simple: "Can confirm it's amazing. Hope it has a decent run."

Five LAIKA films, five Oscar nominations, zero hits. Wildwood arrives with the studio's best reviews ever and its smallest distributor.