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Laika’s new animated film Wildwood came in third at the box office opening weekend, bringing in an estimated $11.6 million from 2,942 theater locations Oct. 23–25. That’s behind Nathan Fielder’s three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything ($19.5 million) and the body horror film Clayface, the top earner with $24 million, according to BoxOfficeReport.com.
The story was pretty different on the ground in independent theaters in Portland, though. Filmgoers flocked to screens to see Wildwood after its intense local marketing blitz (“Wild for Wildwood,” WW, Oct. 20) in support of the homegrown project by Hillsboro’s Laika Studios and based on a 2011 YA fantasy book by local author Colin Meloy and illustrator Carson Ellis.
Laika Studios has not revealed its Wildwood budget, but one of its handcrafted, stop-motion animation films likely runs $60 million to $100 million, according to Forbes. The film was directed by Travis Knight, president and CEO of Laika and the son of Nike co-founder Phil Knight.
Wildwood is Laika’s first PG-13 film. It opens with a character’s suicide attempt and features intense puppet-on-puppet violence in battle scenes between warring factions in the Impassable Wilderness. As a somewhat unusual PG-13 animated film, the $11.6 million is actually a win: The film performed better than the $6 million to $10 million box office haul that analysts had forecast, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Still, the $11.6 million number doesn’t quite match the cultural hype around the film locally, which includes a public art trail of Wildwood crows and product tie-ins at Voodoo Doughnut and Stumptown Coffee.
The Hollywood Theatre is showing the film in both 35 mm and digital formats and was sold out all weekend, according to a spokeswoman. (Every screening in both formats is sold out through Nov. 1.) The theater also hosted a special event with Meloy and Ellis in attendance.
Southeast Portland’s Moreland Theater also had solid attendance all weekend and sold out an Oct. 25 screening that featured a Q&A afterward with three Laika artists. Ticket sales hovered around 200 per showing all weekend for the 268-seat auditorium.
“This is the busiest we’ve been in a long, long time,” says Moreland Theater manager Patrick Schranck. “It’s really connecting with people.”
Screenings at the historic theater have included lots of clapping, laughing and cheering at all of the local references, especially during a sequence early in the film in which the character Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) rides her bike through the city.
“People have had very strong reactions, overwhelmingly positive,” Schranck says.
The same can be said for the nation’s film critics: Wildwood has a 99% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Schranck hopes the rest of the country’s filmgoers catch up to Portland audiences.
“I do wish it would have done better nationally, but it has done very well here in Portland,” he says. “I hope that national audiences appreciate the craftsmanship and the wonderful storytelling, and that more people see it over time. Because it really is a special film.”
