The Best Fantasy Movie of the Year Officially Adds 504 More Theaters

He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema. 

One of the best-reviewed movies of the year, released at a time when the market is overflowing with equally well-received gems, is proving that positive word-of-mouth can do wonders for difficult-to-market projects. The movie comes on the heels of the blockbuster survival-horror Resident Evil and the three-hour documentary You Can See Everything, both of which hold a 96% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. The film we’re talking about has received an even higher score, which has certainly helped its case at the box office. The studio behind the movie chose an unusual release strategy for it — a massively risky path, but one that indicates high self-confidence.

Instead of partnering with a traditional distributor, as the company has done in the past, it chose to release the film via Fathom Events. The biggest difference in going with Fathom is that the studio has the freedom to market its movie as per its own preferences. Instead of relying on a distributor’s in-house marketing department, this time, the studio was able to control the narrative around what it knew to be a masterpiece. The studio’s new movie had big shoes to fill, coming on the heels of critically acclaimed projects such as Coraline, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, and ParaNorman.

Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life
looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in
return.

You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and
somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right
thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.

• This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat,
  fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
• You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost
  everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
• The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives
  every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
• You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.

You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where
you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is
finding out what is over there.

• One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who
  each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
• You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off
  somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
• The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land
  harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
• You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of
  it.

You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The
Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the
people are where it all gets complicated.

• Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is
  a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
• You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the
  Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
• The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a
  rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
• You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story
  got told wrong.

You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and
you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as
everybody kept telling you.

• Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners,
  which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
• You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for
  something nobody thought to test for.
• The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud
  every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
• Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you
  difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.

Here’s How Much the Animated Masterpiece Has Grossed So Far

• Image via LAIKA Studios

• Image via Laika

• Image via Laika

• Image via Laika

Image via LAIKA Studios

Image via Laika

Image via Laika

Image via Laika

By now you’ve probably guessed that we’re talking about the artisanal animation house Laika and its latest offering, Wildwood. The fantasy film was directed by Laika chief Travis Knight, who has already delivered one major movie this year — Amazon MGM’s Masters of the Universe. However, while that film underperformed at the box office, Wildwood has defied the odds to emerge as an early hit. Produced on a reported budget of $100 million, the stop-motion fantasy film has grossed more than $20 million in one week. This has pushed its theater count from 2,596 in week one to 3,100 in week two. The film holds a near-perfect 99% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the consensus reads, “A marvelous technical achievement that packs an emotional wallop, Wildwood reaffirms the value of a thoughtful fantasy tale told straight while dazzling the eye with its innovative and painstaking stop-motion wizardry.” You can watch Wildwood in theaters and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.

Wildwood

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  Peyton Elizabeth Lee

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  Prue McKeel (voice)

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  Jacob Tremblay

  Curtis Mehlberg (voice)

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  Carey Mulligan

  Alexandra (voice)

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  Mahershala Ali

  Brenden (voice)