I didn't expect Laika's Wildwood to become Hollywood's best argument against AI

On Tuesday, the top-grossing film in North America was Wildwood — Laika's stop-motion adaptation of Colin Meloy's novel, taking the day with $2 million over Clayface's $1.9 million. A film animated by hand, frame by frame, over years of puppet work, out-earned the week's CGI superhero release in its second week.

The number behind the number is better. Wildwood's Tuesday was slightly up from its previous Tuesday — a climb World of Reel notes almost never happens for a film this deep into release — after a second weekend that dropped just 25% from a $12 million open. That's a word-of-mouth curve, and r/boxoffice recognized it:

"Another case of WOM working wonders. Love to see it."

A second commenter turned it into a campaign:

"Let's keep the momentum going! If you want more original good movies that takes risk, keep supporting them and you will get more movies like this."

Meanwhile, in Burbank

The same week, Disney held its Accelerator Demo Day, and TheWrap's dispatch reads like the counter-programming. The 2026 cohort is all-in on AI: a startup called Promise doing "gray box" filmmaking where AI fills in backgrounds in near real time, robots stacking 3D glasses at the parks, digital-twin focus groups — and OpenArt, whose CEO Coco Mao coined the week's phrase, "vibe directing": you type conversational instructions, and the video makes itself.

Disney's framing was careful — VP of corporate innovation David Min offered "We're working with the technology to see if it can fit into workflows that we have." The contrast still stands on its own. One side of the industry is testing whether directing can be reduced to typing a vibe; the audience, the same week, lined up for the most laboriously physical filmmaking that exists.

In the same week, hand-built puppets topped the US box office and the world's richest studio demoed "vibe directing."

What the vote actually says

I don't think moviegoers checked the animation method before buying tickets; they came because the film plays. But that's the argument. Wildwood cost an estimated $100 million and spends it on something no model generates — physical texture, imperfection, the sense that thousands of human hours are visible on screen — and audiences are rewarding exactly that with the rarest box-office shape of the year.

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Laika has spent two decades making this case at a loss, from Coraline to Kubo. If Wildwood keeps climbing — World of Reel already calls it the animated-Oscar frontrunner — it stops being a noble exception and becomes the data point every "AI will make movies" pitch meeting has to argue around.

Previously we wrote: 'An AI scam masquerading as a real movie': what happened to Return of the Living Dead