Re-releases of classic films aren’t supposed to make much of a mark at the box office. They usually serve as a helpful stopgap for theaters to bring in a little extra revenue during slow periods on the release slate. But “Coraline” has proven otherwise — and its newfound success has caught the attention of Hollywood.
The debut film from stop-motion animation Laika Studios returned to theaters courtesy of Fathom Events and Trafalgar Releasing this past weekend for its 15th anniversary, and set a record for those distributors with the most successful re-release in their history with $29.3 million grossed worldwide. Last weekend, the film grossed $9.6 million from Friday to Sunday, enough to put it in the top 5.
For comparison, in its original theatrical run from Focus Features in 2009, “Coraline” earned an unadjusted $75.2 million domestic and $124.5 million worldwide. For an inflation-proof comparison, turn to Mexico, where “Coraline” sold 1.6 million tickets. As of Tuesday, Trafalgar’s re-release in that country has sold 1 million tickets, and is projected to get close to that 1.6 million mark.
Hollywood has taken notice.
“I’m meeting with Sony Pictures today,” Fathom CEO Ray Nutt told TheWrap this week. “It’s the sixth studio meeting I’ve had, and a common topic of conversation with the major studios has been how Fathom can do with their catalogs what we have done with Laika and ‘Coraline.’”
What Laika has built in the past decade and a half is not so easily replicable. Arguably, “Coraline” filled a niche for the teens and tweens of the 2000s that “Goosebumps” filled for those of the 90s and “Five Nights at Freddy’s” does for the youth of today. It was effective horror that they didn’t have to sneak into a theater or watch on TV while their parents weren’t looking.
And by being able to both scare and emotionally move millions of teens with a coming-of-age dark fantasy, “Coraline” formed the cornerstone of Laika’s still-growing reputation as a bastion for visually and narratively original animation. All five of the Oregon-based studio’s feature films have been nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, and their sixth film, “Wildwood,” is set to hit theaters in 2025.
“With a re-release like this, you have two buckets of fanbases: the fans who are rushing to come back because they were moved by the story when they first saw it, and fans who want to go deeper with the technology and production,” Kymberli Frueh, SVP of programming and acquisitions at Trafalgar, said. “Laika really has a deep understanding of both types of fanbases, and you can see the results.”
Building up a fanbase that will rush back to theaters to see “Coraline” again isn’t easy, especially when unlike studio-owned counterparts like Pixar or Illumination, Laika doesn’t have a new film coming out every year. When “Wildwood” hits theaters it will be their first new offering since “Missing Link” back in 2019. With such big gaps in releases, how does Laika maintain interest in their films?
For chief marketing and operations officer David Burke, the answer is to embrace that long process. Laika is making the long, painstaking process of stop-motion filmmaking part of how it markets its films to the public and is taking advantage of the fact that unlike a computer-generated or hand-drawn character, a stop-motion character is a tactile, hand-made puppet.
“We’re in a world where people are more likely when they buy something at a store, to not just look at the brand. They look at the ingredients,” Burke said. “It’s become clear to us that people who watch Laika’s films don’t just love the stories and the artistry on the screen. They love the craft and attention to detail that goes into every single frame, so we give them the opportunity to explore that.”
To that end, Laika has regularly loaned out puppets of the most famous characters of its films to museums and theaters around the world, including the Academy Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, and most recently, the BFI Southbank Theatre in London, which is currently running the exhibit “Laika: Frame by Frame” as part of the “Coraline” anniversary.
Laika also makes the stop-motion process part of its social media channel, showing clips of the making of films like “Kubo and the Two Strings” and “Missing Link” on its TikTok page along with marketing for the “Coraline” re-release. Combined, those efforts are helping turn people who became fans of “Coraline” growing up into fans of Laika, and making “Wildwood” an event release for hardcore lovers of animation.
“Along with ‘Coraline,’ we are showing a sneak peek of ‘Wildwood’ at our screenings, and we have heard from exhibitors that there have been cheers for the new footage,” Burke said. “It’s really emotional for us because like ‘Coraline,’ ‘Wildwood’ is a story about a girl from Oregon going on an adventure, and to know that people are so excited just from seeing a preview shows how far this studio has come.”
Depending on how “Wildwood” performs next year, Laika’s partnership with Fathom and Trafalgar may end up being the start of a new chapter for the animation house in the post-pandemic shutdown era. Similar to fans of Studio Ghibli, who have returned on an annual basis for Fathom and GKIDS’ regular re-releases of Hayao Miyazaki’s films, Laika fans have just shown that “Coraline” is so precious to them that they will show up in higher-than-expected numbers for its big screen return.
Burke told TheWrap that Laika wouldn’t rule out similar anniversary screenings for other films from the studio like “ParaNorman” or “Boxtrolls,” and those re-releases could keep Laika fresh in the minds of fans while the studio works on their next feature film. The process may be slower than their peers with computer-generated characters and major studio marketing budgets, but the hard work is paying off.
