Laika’s “Wildwood” Movie Is Being Called a Masterpiece — and It Opens Friday

A perfect early Rotten Tomatoes score, a 9/10 from Collider, and the words “bound for the Oscars” are already following the Wildwood Laika movie into theaters.

By The Cinephile — CelebnMusic247

Every year, one film arrives in theaters carrying a word no publicist can buy: masterpiece. This year, per Collider, that word belongs to Wildwood, the new film from Laika — the stop-motion studio behind Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings — which opens in theaters on October 23, 2026.

Wildwood Laika Movie: The Numbers Behind the Masterpiece Talk

The early numbers explain the noise. Per Collider, Wildwood holds a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes from its first 16 reviews. Collider’s own Aidan Kelley awarded it 9/10 and dubbed it “Laika’s masterpiece,” writing that while the studio has made many visually striking films in nearly two decades, “Wildwood soars above them all with some of the most breathtaking sequences of the year.” ScreenRant’s Liz Declan went further with a perfect 10/10, calling the film “bound for the Oscars,” per Collider — and other critics have called it “remarkable” and Laika’s “crowning achievement.”

Collider also reports the consensus forming around the film: it is already being declared the winner-in-waiting for next year’s Best Animated Feature prize at the Academy Awards.

That is a remarkable position for an animated film opening in late October, a corridor usually owned by horror. But Laika has never played by corridor rules — every frame of a Laika film is built by hand, and audiences who have felt burned by assembly-line animation tend to show up for exactly that craft when word of mouth catches fire.

The test now is conversion: perfect scores are easy to hold at 16 reviews and harder at 160, and a family audience in Halloween season is a real-world exam. But if the reviews are even half right, Wildwood is the rare 2026 release that arrives pre-coronated and still has something to prove. Friday will tell.

Read more: Jason Statham Is Back to Protect the Hive: First “Beekeeper 2” Trailer Drops and ‘Godzilla Minus Zero’ Roars Toward November With a Final Trailer and an R Rating.

Sources: Collider