‘Wildwood’ Heads Into Third Weekend Eying $38 Million Domestic Total After Strong Second Week

Laika’s Wildwood is heading into its third weekend in theaters, having already grossed $32.8 million at the domestic box office and looking to maintain the momentum it built in its second week, when it reached the top of the box office on Tuesday.

Travis Knight’s ambitious stop-motion feature will screen in 2,693 theaters this weekend, only an 8% drop from its opening week last month. The film’s distributor, Fathom Entertainment, says it’s targeting around $5 million over the next three days, which would put the film’s domestic total at roughly $38 million after three weekends, with strong holds in its second and third frames.

That’s an encouraging performance for Laika, which always approaches distribution differently than any other studio of its size and influence. Wildwood‘s current total has already nearly doubled the $16.6 million earned domestically by the studio’s last feature, Missing Link (2019). If Wildwood hits its projected $38 million by next week, it will be within striking distance of the lifetime box office of Kubo and the Two Strings ($48 million) and The Boxtrolls ($50.8 million). That said, it still has a way to go before it might catch up to ParaNorman ($56 million) and Coraline ($75.3 million in its original run).

This is where we point out, once again, that Wildwood is rated PG-13, creating a small but noteworthy hurdle its predecessors didn’t have to worry about.

In our recent interview with Fathom CEO Jason Brenek, he explained how Laika’s experiences with traditional Hollywood distribution helped bring the two companies together:

They knew that they had the base of an audience that they were serving. They also felt, after working within the studio system, the traditional Hollywood system, for the entirety of their existence, that they wanted to have a creative hand in how to reach that audience, how to actually bring their content to their biggest fans.

With a reported $100 million production budget, Wildwood is still far from profitability in a conventional Hollywood sense, but its relatively modest weekly declines suggest that strong word-of-mouth is working and that the film is reaching an audience beyond its initial Laika fanbase.

As we’ve pointed out before, Laika also doesn’t depend on initial box-office run revenues the way other studios do. The company is as good as any at long-term exploitation of its catalog, and has the rare luxury of a well-funded owner who values artistic legacy over short-term profitability.