Wildwood (2026) Review: A 100% RT Masterpiece — and It's About to Become One of the Year's Biggest Box-Office Bombs

Travis Knight's Wildwood is the best-reviewed film LAIKA has ever released, and also the studio's biggest financial gamble — critics are unanimous that it's a masterpiece, and audiences so far don't seem to care.

Wildwood opened in theaters October 23, 2026, closing out a production that took LAIKA studio chief Travis Knight roughly 16 years to bring from option to screen. Based on Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis's Wildwood Chronicles book series, the stop-motion epic follows Portland teenager Prue McKeel (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) into the Impassable Wilderness after her baby brother is abducted by a murder of crows, with Jacob Tremblay, Awkwafina, Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali and Angela Bassett rounding out the voice cast. It's LAIKA's first PG-13 release, and at roughly two hours and fifteen minutes, its longest film by a wide margin.

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The reviews are as good as stop-motion reviews get

Wildwood holds a 100% Tomatometer score from 87 counted reviews — the first perfect critics' score in LAIKA's history — alongside an 85 on Metacritic and a 98% audience score from more than 250 verified Rotten Tomatoes ratings. That's not just strong; it's the kind of consensus that essentially never happens for a 139-minute animated fantasy epic. Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter called it "LAIKA's most ambitious effort to date," adding that "Wildwood may also be the company's masterpiece." Variety's Guy Lodge was similarly unreserved, writing that "as both a formal achievement and a generation-crossing crowd pleaser, Wildwood is a spectacular success," while allowing that "longtime LAIKA fans may harbor warmer feelings for the studio's smaller, quirkier outings."

What the reviews actually praise

The consistent thread across the acclaim is scale paired with handmade craft — critics keep returning to the fact that a film this massive in scope was built the slow, physical way LAIKA has always worked, not rendered. FlickDirect's review (grade: A-) called it "another visual masterpiece for LAIKA," specifically praising the character and creature animation and an ensemble voice cast it described as delivering "emotionally resonant performances" across the board. The directing itself draws specific credit too: this is Travis Knight working at the largest scale of his career, and reviewers consistently note that the ambition never swamps the emotional core of a sister searching for her brother.

The one real criticism that keeps surfacing

Even inside a 100% consensus, reviewers have flagged the same soft spot: pacing. FlickDirect's review, while still landing on an A-, noted that the film "feels unnecessarily long," singling out an extended eagle-flight sequence as a stretch that goes on past the point it needs to, before resolving with a sudden, graphically violent beat that reviewers found tonally jarring against the rest of the film. That's consistent with Wildwood being LAIKA's first PG-13 release — the studio pushes into genuinely darker material here (war, kidnapping, on-screen death), and that maturity is part of what critics are praising, but it's also part of why this isn't the family-friendly Saturday matinee LAIKA's earlier films were.

The box office problem reviews can't fix

Here's the part that makes Wildwood's reception unusual rather than simply a triumph: despite the reviews, the film is tracking for just a $6-8 million opening weekend against a widely reported production budget north of $100 million. Industry trackers point to a specific, unglamorous set of reasons — the PG-13 rating cuts off the built-in family audience that drove LAIKA's past hits like Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, the 139-minute runtime is a tough sell for an animated film regardless of rating, and general audience awareness has stayed limited despite the critical wave. One trade analysis bluntly summarized the situation as a film "almost nobody" outside critics and hardcore animation fans currently has on their radar, even as it opens as the presumptive Best Animated Feature frontrunner for next year's Oscars.

How a $100 million passion project gets made at all

Part of how Wildwood exists in the first place traces back to Travis Knight's position at LAIKA, which his father Nike co-founder Phil Knight has backed for years — a structure that has let this specific project be treated more like a true passion project than a standard studio bet that lives or dies on opening weekend. That's relevant context for anyone wondering how a movie this acclaimed can simultaneously be projected as one of the year's biggest financial underperformers: the usual commercial pressure that forces a film like this into a shorter runtime or a safer rating didn't apply here in the same way it would at a major studio.

Should you see it

If the pitch is "gorgeous, handmade stop-motion epic with a genuinely unanimous critical reception," Wildwood delivers on exactly that, and the runtime complaints are the kind of criticism that comes up in an otherwise rapturous review, not a real warning sign. It is, however, a different kind of LAIKA film than Coraline or ParaNorman — darker, longer, and pitched at an older audience than the studio's reputation might suggest, so parents expecting an easy family outing should know what they're walking into. Given the box office signals, this is also a film with a real chance of becoming harder to see on a big screen the longer you wait, so animation fans who want the theatrical stop-motion experience have more reason than usual not to put this one off.