Wildwood is the latest buzzy title that’s been on every cinephile’s tongue lately. Everyone in my circle can’t stop singing its praises, so I knew this trip to the theater needed to be one of my biggest priorities. I finally got to join in on the excitement this past weekend, and I feel like I can finally breathe in some real, human air for once this month while a full-on AI Odyssey gets lost at sea. Ahhhhhhhh…
The magic of Wildwood’s stunning, borderline psychologically insane level of detail is a gravitational pull all its own. But what I’ve found the most fascinating about all of the chatter I’m reading about it online is that the praise seems to come not really from the story itself, but the care that went in to the story. A distinction that makes me wonder if our industry has gotten to a point where the physical act of making art itself is the highest selling point for audiences.
At its core, Wildwood’s story follows a very simple quest narrative: a teenage heroine named Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) who must face impossible odds to save her kidnapped brother from the “Impassible Wilderness.” Taking on an ambitious claymation-style filmmaking to tell its tale, Wildwood took almost 16 (!!!) years to make. This has been the biggest marketing angle I’ve seen from the film, even though historically claymation cinema has never really been a big money maker, with relatively few films crossing that $100 million threshold in box office history—a number that even this revolutionary tale isn’t expected to cross.
Wildwood is definitely a riskier bet for a studio in our post-pandemic landscape, where sequels and established IPs are usually the more frugal options being chosen. But the more I read through people’s enthusiastic reactions to the film, the more hopeful I am that there are movies out there still being made that put their community and cultural impact first. And what’s even more encouraging? That this is still a thing that people actively want to buy tickets for.
Thanks to the engagement success of Wildwood, it feels like the biggest marketing tactic a movie can make nowadays is simply saying: Hey, we’re made by humans, for humans. It’s a pretty low bar for a movie campaign, but in this political climate, it seems to be working. Even if a story is really quite simple and formulaic, if there is intention behind its making, people will show up because you’re genuinely trying to say something that’s real. A quote that I love and feels fitting for this moment is from Mia Dolan (Emma Stone) in La La Land: “People love what other people are passionate about.”
When it comes to making movies, being able to connect, inspire, challenge, and feel closer to the messiness of our world, and not be pressured to match the picture-perfect artificial ones, is why people are going to keep showing up for movies like Wildwood forever.
Watching the reactions to it is one of the biggest signs of life I’ve seen in the industry lately, especially coming off of other successful, risqué filmmaking choices like the genre-bending You Can See Everything and the welcoming of new, young talent like Kane Parsons (Backrooms) and Curry Barker (Obsession) earlier this year.
And regardless of how much money Wildwood ends up making, I have a growing sense that a movie like this can still pay off in the long run because it does the thing movies are supposed to do in the first place: connect. I never thought that thoughtfulness could be a major marketing play for a movie, but alas, movies like Wildwood level that ground in a very human way, and I hope I get the privilege of being able to latch on to more risky movies like this one for the sake of knowing ourselves and what we’re capable of a little bit better.
