{"id":19848,"date":"2025-04-14T18:15:09","date_gmt":"2025-04-14T18:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/19848\/"},"modified":"2025-04-14T18:15:09","modified_gmt":"2025-04-14T18:15:09","slug":"laikas-latest-movie-has-disappeared-without-a-trace-where-is-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/19848\/","title":{"rendered":"LAIKA’s Latest Movie Has Disappeared Without a Trace (Where Is It?)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stop-motion animation is an arduous process involving animators, small figurines\/marionettes, richly detailed sets, and laboriously making the unreal real. That\u2019s why the animation wizards at Laika don\u2019t crank out a new movie every year. Instead, the folks behind Coraline, ParaNorman, and Kubo and the Two Strings (among other features) put quality over quantity when it comes to other filmography. This animation outfit, led by Travis Knight, has spent years working hard on its latest animated feature, Wildwood<\/a> (also helmed by Knight).<\/p>\n

\t\t\tVideos by ComicBook.com\n\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Last August, the theatrical re-release of Coraline was accompanied by a tease for Wildwood announcing a 2025 release date for the feature. It was a high-profile marketing maneuver that put the next Laika motion picture on countless people\u2019s radars. However, in the following eight months, further updates on Wildwood\u2019s release have been nonexistent. Where exactly has the latest Laika movie gone? And will it ever see the light of day?<\/p>\n

The Corporate Reasons for Wildwood\u2019s Disappearance<\/p>\n

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Most American animation companies have big corporate owners. Pixar is under Disney ownership. DreamWorks Animation belongs to Universal. The list goes on and on. However, independent animation studios do exist and Laika is part of that rare breed. Though the company is co-owned by Nike, Inc. co-founder Phil Knight, Wildwood doesn\u2019t belong to a major or indie American movie studio. That alone suggests why Wildwood has struggled to get a concrete release date or distribution plans: there isn\u2019t a studio that\u2019s already supposed to release it to audiences, like Pixar or Illumination films.<\/p>\n

While Focus Features handled the first four Laika titles, Laika secured Annapurna\/United Artists Releasing distribution for 2019\u2019s Missing Link. The Coraline re-releases, meanwhile, have been distributed by Fathom Entertainment, a sign that Laika, not Focus Features, is now controlling that feature. Even with Laika\u2019s esteemed pedigree, it\u2019s unquestionably difficult for any movie, including costly independent endeavors like Wildwood, to get picked up by studios. The current indie movie landscape is in a dire state that\u2019s led to recent titles like Ponyboi, Hundreds of Beavers, A Nice Indian Boy, No Other Land, and others to self-distribute.<\/p>\n

These dire conditions alone make it clear why Wildwood struggled to get any release plans. Laika needs a major distributor to get this costly project out to the masses, yet even indie labels like A24 or Neon are only sparingly acquiring outside projects these days. The middling box office track record of the last two Laika films (Kubo and Link) is also undoubtedly making it harder to secure release plans for Wildwood. Sure, Coraline is a license to print money, but potential Wildwood distributors might see that as an exception, not the rule. In a marketplace dominated by timidity, a stop-motion animated epic like Wildwood is unlikely to secure much-needed distribution.<\/p>\n

[RELATED: LAIKA Teaming Up With Spider-Verse\u2019s Phil Lord and Chris Miller for First Live-Action Movie<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Wildwood Has Vanished, Yet It Appears To Be Finished<\/p>\n

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Even with these corporate woes breathing down Wildwood\u2019s neck, it\u2019s still puzzling how much this feature has fallen off people\u2019s radar. It\u2019s especially bizarre given how PG-rated animated films have become reliable box office moneymakers in the last two years. Even with titles like The Wild Robot, Migration, and Dog Man proving that audiences will show up to animated family movies that aren\u2019t just sequels, though, there\u2019s been absolutely no rumblings or even rumors about a Wildwood release date, let alone more concrete details about when audiences can see this feature. <\/p>\n

What makes the entire Wildwood predicament extra bizarre is that, by all indicators, the movie appears to be finished. This has never been officially confirmed or announced, however, Wildwood director Travis Knight has moved on to helming Masters of the Universe for Amazon MGM Studios and Mattel<\/a>. Given how intensive the process is for making a stop-motion animated movie, it\u2019s doubtful Knight would be juggling both of these projects. More likely, Wildwood (which started \u201cshooting\u201d in September 2021<\/a>) finally finished in 2025\u2019s earliest days, which finally freed up Knight to take on another live-action directing assignment.<\/p>\n

Even though all signs point to Wildwood finally being finished, that hasn\u2019t stopped the film from disappearing. Tragically, this outcome seems to be a symptom of larger problems plaguing the entire indie cinema sphere. Not even Laika artists are exempt from such turmoil. However, fans of this animation label shouldn\u2019t lose hope of ever seeing Wildwood. If Coyote vs. Acme could secure a theatrical release<\/a> after enduring way more extreme duress, then surely Wildwood will eventually hit theaters. <\/p>\n

Coraline is available for rental or purchase from digital retailers, Wildwood will hit theaters on an unspecified 2025 date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stop-motion animation is an arduous process involving animators, small figurines\/marionettes, richly detailed sets, and laboriously making the unreal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19849,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,12940,3943,4580,16,15,12941],"class_list":{"0":"post-19848","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-laika","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-regular-feature","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-wildwood"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114337685434464767","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}