Can adult animation sell? Laikas Wildwood will be the latest test

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Set us as preferred When Laika’s “Wildwood” opens on Oct.23, it will do something few animated films attempt: arrive in theaters with a PG-13 rating.

The stop-motion fantasy is the studio’s first film rated above PG, and much of the industry is watching to see whether a darker, more mature animated feature can find an audience.The odds favor the familiar.This year, family audiences turned out for “Toy Story 5,” “Minions and Monsters” and “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.” Six of 2026’s 20 highest-grossing films domestically are animated, according to Box Office Mojo, and all six are rated PG.

Only two, Pixar’s “Hoppers” and the Stephen Curry-produced sports comedy “Goat,” are original stories not tied to a franchise.Laika, the Oscar-nominated studio behind movies like “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” wants to challenge the assumption that animation has to play to everyone at once.“It’s an epic fantasy.It has real danger.

It’s got like real emotional stakes and consequences,” David Burke, an executive producer on “Wildwood,” said.“Animation is a medium.

It’s not an age category.”Laika didn’t set out to make a PG-13 movie.The film was rated for strong fantasy violence and bloody images, thematic material, suicide-related material, brief partial nudity and language.

The studio didn’t change course when the rating came back, Burke said, because the goal was to tell the story as truthfully as possible.“It doesn’t mean like we’re turning away from families,” Burke said.“It means that we don’t believe that family audiences require filmmakers to remove complexity or darkness or consequence from a story.”The studio expects a broad audience, including teenagers and young adults who grew up on its films, fantasy-loving adults and families.

It has some evidence that...