2026’s 130-Minute Ambitious Fantasy Movie Shatters Rotten Tomatoes Record

A Rotten Tomatoes record is smashed by the year’s most ambitious fantasy movie.

The fantasy genre previously left its mark this year with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, which is 2026’s second highest-grossing movie at $1.79 billion worldwide, only behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day, along with a 94% critics’ score and 96% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Elsewhere in the genre, this year’s movies include Practical Magic 2, The Magic Faraway Tree, Swapped, Forgotten Island, Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender, and Disney’s live-action Moana, while The Cat in the Hat, Jumanji: Open World, and Disney’s Hexed are among those still to come.

2026’s most ambitious fantasy movie is Wildwood, which has debuted with a “Verified Hot” 97% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes based on more than 500 verified ratings. This shatters the record for the highest Popcornmeter score in the history of Laika Studios’ feature films, with the crown previously belonging to Kubo and the Two Strings at 87%. It has also far surpassed Coraline (74%), ParaNorman (73%), The Boxtrolls (73%), and Missing Link (67%).

As for Wildwood’s Tomatometer score, it has a 100% based on 107 reviews as of this writing, which is also a new record for Laika. Check out a breakdown of the studio’s history of Rotten Tomatoes scores below:

As a studio that solely makes stop-motion animation, Laika’s movies have always been ambitious, but Wildwood goes to another level with its 16-year journey to the big screen. The novel by Colin Meloy was optioned by Laika in 2010, a year before being published, and the adaptation did not go into production until 2021, meaning it was in the works for 16 years and spent five years in production.

When ScreenRant‘s Tatiana Hullender went behind-the-scenes of Wildwood and spoke with the movie’s creatives, screenwriter Chris Butler shared that “Wildwood in particular is definitely the most technically ambitious thing we’ve ever done… 10 years ago, we couldn’t have made Wildwood. I think even when I wrote the first draft, which was 2014, I knew that a lot of what I was writing was going to be incredibly difficult to achieve.”

Brad Schiff, who oversaw the film’s animation, revealed that while Laika’s last movie, Missing Link, had a total of 1,800 shots, Wildwood “had 2,900 [shots], and 900 of them were a second or less. It’s shot and edited like a live-action film, but it takes just as long to set up a 12-frame shot as it does a 120-frame shot, except the animator will finish it in two days. It’s just a lot of setup time.” All the models for the characters and various settings are handcrafted and operated by hand for the stop-motion animation.

• Credit: Laika

• Credit: Laika

The film follows 13-year-old Prue McKeel (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) who ventures into a mysterious and forbidden forest known as the Impassable Wilderness when her baby brother, Mac (Arthur Knight), is kidnapped by crows. As she meets talking animals and encounters magic, her journey becomes bigger than the search for Mac, culminating in an epic battle where the future of the magical realm is at stake. Other key characters include Curtis Mehlberg (Jacob Tremblay), Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), Brendan (Mahershala Ali), Septima (Awkwafina), the General (Angela Bassett), Iphigenia (Tattoo Cardinal), Mr. McKeel (Jake Johnson), and Mrs. McKeel (Maya Erskine).

In ScreenRant‘s Wildwood review, Liz Declan gave the movie 10 out of 10 stars and wrote that “Wildwood is at once beautiful and horrifying, heartwarming and gut-wrenching, hopeful and crushing. Neither the narrative nor the animation hold back in any one of these areas to make the others work.” Due to some of these darker and more mature elements, the movie is rated PG-13, which is a rarity for animated films, and with a 130-minute runtime is longer than most of its animated predecessors.

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The extensive praise bodes well for Wildwood to receive a nomination for Best Animated Feature at the 2027 Academy Awards, and it may end up being the favorite to win in this category. Near-universal acclaim has also already led to discussions on social media about the movie being worthy of a Best Picture nomination, although this is a recognition that is rarely given to animation. The last time an animated movie received a Best Picture nomination was for Toy Story 3 at the 2011 Academy Awards.

Wildwood is now playing in theaters.

Wildwood