Forgotten Island opened $370,000 above Puss in Boots: The Last Wish

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish opened in the United States in December 2022 to $12,429,515. It finished its run on $186,090,535. That is a multiplier of just under 15, and its second weekend went up rather than down, to $16,815,340, according to The Numbers.

The two men who directed it, Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado, also directed Forgotten Island, which opened on Friday. DreamWorks Animation's film about two best friends lost in a spirit world drawn from Philippine mythology took an estimated $12.8m and finished the weekend fifth.

The gap between the two openings is $370,485.

Most of the weekend coverage has filed Forgotten Island as a failure, and on the raw number it is a weak opening for a film that cost $80m to make. The particular flavour of weak is what matters, though, because this directing pair has opened on this number before and walked out of it with $186m.

The per-screen figure is better than the one that became $186m

Forgotten Island played 3,548 locations, Box Office Mojo reports, which works out at $3,607 a screen. The Last Wish opened on 4,099 sites, or $3,032 a screen. Like for like, the new film is running about 19% ahead of the one that made $186m, from 551 fewer cinemas.

The reception is at least as strong. Forgotten Island holds 95% on Rotten Tomatoes from 91 reviews, with a 97% audience score, an A CinemaScore and a PostTrak reading of 82% "definite recommend", TheWrap reported. The Last Wish also sat at 95%, from a larger sample of critics. Those are the numbers that, in animation, normally buy a long tail, because the audience is families who come when they can rather than on the Friday.

The estimates themselves do not agree. Box Office Mojo and BoxOfficeReport both have $12.8m for the weekend; TheWrap published $11.5m. Actuals land on Monday.

What the 15x actually needed

This is where the comparison stops being kind to the new film.

The Last Wish opened on 21 December 2022, straight into the fortnight when American schools are shut and a family will see two or three things rather than one. The multiplier was not a mystery. It was a calendar. Word of mouth did real work after that, helped by a TikTok trend Variety documented in the new year, but the holiday gave the word of mouth somewhere to spend itself. The second weekend rising 35% is the tell.

Forgotten Island opened on 25 September. Nothing is sitting behind it.

The fairer comparison is the studio's last late-September release. The Wild Robot opened on 27 September 2024 to $35,790,150 and closed on $143,901,945, a multiplier of 4.02. Apply that to $12.8m and Forgotten Island ends its domestic run near $51.5m. Apply The Last Wish's 14.97 and it ends at $191.6m. Those two answers are the entire argument about this film, and an opening weekend cannot settle it.

The low table is longer than the coverage suggests

$12.8m is being described as close to a DreamWorks record. It is not especially close to one. Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken opened to $5.2m in 2023 by Cartoon Brew's count and $5.5m by TheWrap's. Spirit Untamed took $6.2m in June 2021. Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas did $6.2m in 2003. And The Last Wish did $12.4m.

So at least four DreamWorks titles have opened under this one, and the studio cleared a profit on one of them. The honest ranking is somewhere around fifth-lowest, which is bad without being historic.

The money

$80m is the production budget, $30m below the $110m The Numbers lists for The Last Wish. Add a global marketing spend and the share exhibitors keep, and a picture like this is looking for something close to $200m worldwide before Universal, which distributes for DreamWorks, treats it as profitable in cinemas. The opening produced about $20.6m of that: $12.8m domestic and a reported $7.8m from 31 overseas markets.

On The Wild Robot's legs, $200m is out of reach. On The Last Wish's, it is comfortable. My read is that the first answer is the likelier one, and that the distance between 95% reviews and a fifth-place opening is a marketing problem rather than an audience one. People who saw this film liked it more than they liked anything else released this weekend. Far fewer of them knew it was out.

None of this came as a surprise inside the building. DreamWorks showed work in progress at CinemaCon in April and again at the Annecy animation festival in June, where the footage drew a five-minute ovation. Mercado is a Filipino American director, and the voice cast was assembled accordingly: Lea Salonga, Dolly de Leon, Manny Jacinto, Liza Soberano, Jo Koy and H.E.R., with Dave Franco and Jenny Slate alongside them. The care is visible in the thing itself. What it ran into was a September weekend carrying four wide releases, three of which took more than $19m.

That is a solvable failure, and it is the kind Universal has solved before. The Wild Robot opened in this same slot two years ago and turned $35.8m into $143.9m on word of mouth. It is also the kind of failure that gets less solvable every week a film is in release.

What to watch

Above it on the chart sat a seven-year-old re-release, Avengers: Endgame Encore, which took $26m, and A24's Primetime, which opened at $19.2m on a $15m budget. A 2019 film on 3,060 screens made $8,496 apiece, more than twice what the best-reviewed release of the weekend managed.

The competition for family screens arrives in stages. Laika's Wildwood comes through Fathom on 23 October, Warner Bros' The Cat in the Hat on 6 November, and Disney's Hexed at Thanksgiving on 25 November.

The number that decides which film this is comes on Sunday 4 October. A normal animation second weekend drops 40% or so, to roughly $7.7m. The Last Wish went up.