‘The Wild Robot’ Has What It Takes to Turn $35 Million Opening Into a Long, Successful Run | Analysis

It’s harder these days for animated films to find an audience without a recognizable brand. But with both critic and moviegoer acclaim on its side, Universal/DreamWorks’ “The Wild Robot” has the tools it needs to turn a modest $35 million domestic opening weekend into a long theatrical run that could last through the end of the year.

“Robot” will have to defy a historic trend of tough roads to success for animated science fiction. One critical strategy will be to leverage positive reviews and word of mouth to appeal to families and women over 35 at a time when the box office offers those audiences fewer options.

“Robot” took in $53 million globally in its opening weekend, a solid performance against a reported $78 million budget.

But the $35 million domestic box office was not close to the $43.7 million opening (unadjusted for inflation) that the franchise-spawning “How to Train Your Dragon” earned in 2010 or the $63 million opening of Pixar’s “WALL-E” in 2008.

Heading into the weekend, tracking was projecting a domestic opening for Chris Sanders’ animated film below $30 million, somewhere in the range of the $25 million start earned last weekend by Paramount’s “Transformers One” and the $29.6 million start earned by Disney/Pixar’s “Elemental” in 2023.

“We’ve had to really readjust our expectations to what we consider a hit debut,” said Comscore analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “Several years ago, a $35 million start for a film like this might have been a little disappointing. But given what’s going on in the market where the family films that do well are the ones that sell on what people have seen before, it’s perhaps encouraging instead.”

The struggle to sell animated science fiction

At the tail end of the Disney Renaissance of the 1990s, Disney and other animation studios sought to target young male audiences. The first movie to attempt that was “Titan A.E.,” initially developed by Fox as a live-action feature called “Planet Ice” before pivoting to animation and releasing in the summer of 2000.

Everything seemed to align. The project boasted a starry cast with Matt Damon, Drew Barrymore, Bill Pullman and John Leguizamo, and a filmmaking team that included Don Bluth, Joss Whedon and John August. But the movie, which made $36.8 million on a budget that was reportedly $90 million, was astronomically expensive as it awkwardly mixed traditional and computer-generated animation.

Disney followed suit, with “Atlantis: The Lost Empire,” a vaguely steampunk-ish adventure, in 2001 that earned $186 million on a budget of $120 million, and “Treasure Planet,” a sci-fi reinvention of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic, in 2002, which cost more than “Atlantis” and made even less, grossing $109.6 million on a budget of $140 million.

More recently, Pixar’s “Lightyear,” a science fiction spin-off of the “Toy Story” franchise, underperformed in the summer of 2022 (budget: $200 million, gross: $226 million) and was followed soon after by Disney’s “Strange World,” released in the fall of 2o22 (budget: $180 million, gross: $73.6 million).

And Paramount and Hasbro’s “Transformers One,” released earlier in September, plummeted 63% this weekend from its opening weekend and has grossed just under $39 million in the U.S. and $72 million worldwide. With “The Wild Robot” peeling off more audiences than expected, “Transformers One” will need overseas grosses to help it break even theatrically against its $75 million budget before marketing costs.

“The Wild Robot” may end up doing better than all those films because it has something that sells to a wider audience more than an origin story about Optimus Prime: a fable about parenthood. Based on Peter Brown’s bestselling books, the film stars Lupita Nyong’o as Roz, a robot stranded in the wilderness who unexpectedly becomes the stepmother to an orphaned gosling, with her efforts to raise her new avian ward resulting in her befriending an entire forest worth of creatures, including a snarky fox named Fink, played by Pedro Pascal.

Most audiences may not be familiar with the mythos of “Transformers” or have read Robert Louis Stevenson or be moved by the visuals of “Atlantis,” but few things are more universally human than parenthood. The colorful visuals and moving score by Kris Bowers have helped bring “The Wild Robot” critical acclaim. But it is the story of Roz figuring out how to raise a child as she goes along that is its best selling point.

The demographics results reflect that. While 64% of opening weekend audiences were from family groups, 15% were from ages 45 and older, according to data from EntTelligence. Insiders at Universal also noted to TheWrap that while audience reception scores were strong across all demographics with a 96% positive rating from PostTrak surveys, the strongest scores came from female moviegoers over 35.

With no major family friendly titles hitting theaters until “Wicked” and “Moana 2” in mid-November, there’s a wide-open lane for “The Wild Robot” to potentially top the $154 million domestic run of “Elemental,” which relied on incredible post-release word-of-mouth to make its box office comeback last year. And given that there are two more books in Brown’s series to adapt, it wouldn’t be surprising for Universal to green light a sequel in a few weeks.

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