American billionaire Phil Knight's $100 million film opens to $11.8 million

American billionaire Phil Knight's animation studio Laika took an estimated $11.8 million in North American theaters over the weekend with Wildwood, a stop-motion fantasy that cost about $100 million and was 16 years in the making.

The film, directed by Knight's son Travis, Laika's president and chief executive, finished third at the box office from Friday to Sunday behind the superhero film Clayface, which opened with about $24 million. The result beat analysts' forecasts of $6 million to $10 million and put Wildwood roughly level with the $12.6 million debut of Kubo and the Two Strings, Laika's 2016 film, which Travis Knight also directed.

Knight, 88, the co-founder of Nike Inc., is the studio's chairman and has financed it for more than two decades. He has a net worth of about $25.1 billion, most of it tied to his family's stake in the world's largest sportswear maker. That fortune is down about $5.3 billion this year as Nike's shares have fallen.

A family studio in Oregon

Laika grew out of Will Vinton Studios, the Portland, Oregon, animation house behind the California Raisins commercials. Knight invested in the business in 1998 and took control of the struggling company in 2002. It was renamed Laika in 2005 and works from a campus in Hillsboro, a suburb west of Portland, with a staff of about 400 animators, puppet makers and support workers.

Travis Knight, 53, started at the studio as an animator and has sat on Nike's board since 2015. He also directed Bumblebee, the 2018 live-action Transformers film made for Paramount.

The studio's films have earned praise from critics and Hollywood, but little money at the box office. All five of its previous features, Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings and Missing Link, were nominated for the Academy Award for best animated feature. Coraline, released in 2009 on a budget of about $60 million, has grossed about $188 million worldwide after several re-releases and is the only one of the five widely counted as a box office success. Missing Link, which also cost about $100 million, took just $26.6 million worldwide in 2019.

Laika's biggest bet

Wildwood is the longest project the studio has attempted. Adapted from the 2011 children's novel by Colin Meloy and Carson Ellis, it follows a girl who goes into a forbidden forest to rescue her baby brother. The voice cast includes Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, Angela Bassett, Awkwafina, Jacob Tremblay and Tom Waits.

It runs more than two hours, making it the longest stop-motion feature ever released, and it is Laika's first film rated PG-13 in the U.S. A single 12-minute battle sequence uses about 3,000 handmade figures across more than 400 shots. The film had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival on Oct. 11 and drew strong reviews before its release.

"Wildwood is the biggest world Laika has ever built, and the most personal," Travis Knight said when the release date was set in January. "Our movie is a celebration of artistry over algorithms."

The studio also changed how it brings films to theaters. Its earlier releases went out through distributors such as Focus Features and United Artists Releasing. For Wildwood, Laika kept marketing in-house and hired Fathom Entertainment, a smaller distributor known for event screenings and re-releases, to handle the U.S. rollout. Fathom had earlier re-released Coraline and ParaNorman for the studio. FilmNation Entertainment is selling the international rights.

Travis Knight is set to direct the studio's next two films, The Night Gardener and an adaptation of Susanna Clarke's novel Piranesi.