Remember that $100M price tag for Travis Knight's "Wildwood"? Forget it.
That number came from exactly one place: a single throwaway line in a Variety box-office piece. Nobody questioned it. Nobody had reason to. Now, according to TheInSneider, it was flat-out wrong. Not a little wrong, but way wrong.
Try four times that amount. Maybe more.
One source describes the actual cost of bringing Knight's 17-year passion project to the screen as "astronomical." Another goes further, claiming "Wildwood" is the most expensive animated movie ever made, and it's not even close. What's even wilder is that the $400M figure might be the low end; the same source says costs might have gone as high as $700M! And that's, of course, where I have to draw the line. $700M? Really?
Regardless, just taking $400M as the actual price, let that sink in for a second. A stop-motion movie from Laika, the scrappy Oregon studio behind "Coraline" and "Kubo and the Two Strings," may have outspent every Pixar, Disney and DreamWorks blockbuster in history.
How does that even happen? Time. "Wildwood" has reportedly been in physical production for six years (!!). And legendary cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, the man who shot "The Right Stuff" and "The Black Stallion," was on set for three full years. That's not a shoot. That's a residency.
Stop-motion has always been a labor of love, painstaking frame-by-frame work where a good week might yield a few seconds of usable footage. But this is something else entirely. This is Knight, who also happens to be Laika's CEO and the son of Nike co-founder Phil Knight, going all in on a passion project with what appears to be daddy's money. Daddy, by the way, has a net worth of around $36 billion.
The result? Great reviews and a clear Oscar frontrunner for Best Animated Feature. But it’s also set for a $9M opening weekend, which means this film's losses will likely be unmatched by any film in history.
Now, before anyone criticizes the self-praise, this is nothing new for Serra. The man has been his own biggest hype machine for many years now.