I just walked through the front door after seeing Laika’s Wildwood with my family at a Cinemark down in Austin. We did the whole theatrical spread: big screen, surround sound, and those D-BOX motion seats that pitch and rumble beneath you. My 14-year-old daughter is a notoriously tough customer when it comes to movies; if a story is hollow or procedural, she checks out in ten minutes. She loved it. We all did.
The stop-motion craft on display is nothing short of breathtaking. There is simply no other medium that could tell that specific story with that level of tactile, idiosyncratic magic, or rather, I should say, the medium it was told in elevated it beyond the script in a way that made it special. When you sit through twenty minutes of trailers for the upcoming slate of studio CGI offerings like Disney’s Hex, the new Cat in the Hat, and whatever focus-grouped algorithm gave birth to the latest Illumination entry, everything blurs together into an uninspired soup. It feels extruded from an assembly line of brand-safe procedural plugins designed to offend no one and surprise no one. Then the lights dim, the screen expands, and Wildwood hits you with the unmistakable grit of thumbprints on foam rubber, fabric, and physical armatures. The contrast is staggering. You feel it in every frame.
I’m not a film critic. I’m not here to debate if the story was a standard YA offering, if it was too long, or whether it was woke. There are enough of those opinions online already, and I don’t see any point in adding to that noise. What interests me is that Travis Knight made something on his own terms, offered it to the world, and it was close enough to great that I have zero complaints, and I will happily be picking up the physical 4K/Blu-ray when it drops.
This is a massive creative triumph for Laika, and an equally massive operational win for Fathom Entertainment. Fathom did what legacy Hollywood has spent the last decade refusing to do: they put an ambitious, handcrafted, original, non-franchise fantasy on thousands of domestic screens and treated the theatrical experience like an event that mattered.
On those two fronts, there is nothing that can take that away from either party. However, there is an elephant in the screening room.
In the press run leading up to this release, Travis Knight has made a public habit of taking potshots at another craft that can’t be ignored: artificial intelligence. Framing the entire cultural conversation as a neat moral binary: the noble, pure, hand-sculpted artisanal master versus the lazy, tech-obsessed barbarians at the gate.
I don’t harbor any personal grudge against Knight. But I think it’s important to address what that argument actually represents. For better or worse, it is a luxury position. It is the unexamined economic gospel of a trust-fund auteur who has never once in his adult life had to stare at an empty bank account and wonder how he was going to buy silicone, rent a workspace, or keep the lights on while chasing an artistic vision.
Portland has never been particularly renowned for its ironclad grasp of real-world economics, and Knight’s stance is a textbook symptom of that disconnect. Don’t get me wrong. I do want rich people to create, too. I have nothing against them. I want to be one of them, but when your studio’s multi-million-dollar production bills are backstopped by Phil Knight’s Nike fortune, you don’t live under the laws of physical gravity. You can spend sixteen years, hundreds of millions of dollars, and an army of hundreds of world-class guild craftspeople to realize a single film that opened to $11.3 million domestically ($12.2 million North American total). If it loses tens of millions of dollars at the box office, nobody starves. The lights don’t get shut off. The machine keeps humming.
Most independent filmmakers do not live on that planet.
Right now, as I write this, my workshop bench is a disaster area. I’m in the middle of engineering a cable-driven Xenomorph Chestburster puppet for a Halloween costume and shooting a tutorial on the build. It was supposed to be a straightforward little weekend project, and it has fought me violently every single step of the way: latex drying too stiff, cable controls not working as I imagined, plastic bits snapping under the tension. That is one puppet for a holiday costume.
Now scale that up. On my independent sci-fi feature, Escape From Planet Omega-12, I am the one building the puppets and props. I am the one fabricating the miniature physical sets from scratch in my workshop during my off-hours. I am the one carrying the brutal, grinding stress of a deadline, knowing that every single hour spent rolling latex tentacles or painting foam is an hour stolen from sleep, with no guarantee that the shot won’t fall apart when the shutter clicks, or that internet puritans won’t immediately attack the finished product simply because those physical builds are composited alongside local AI generative video.
I don’t incorporate AI into my pipeline because I’m lazy. I incorporate it because my time, my physical stamina, and my private capital are finite. I do it because there are chances there to push new boundaries that money alone can’t push for me. For independent artists without an inheritance, hybrid workflows, pairing physical practical effects with targeted, invisible AI enhancements, are the only reason our stories can step out of a spiral notebook and onto a screen.
What makes Knight’s disapproval so profoundly ironic is that the very independent creators he looks down on are the ones who love the kind of work he does. People like us do want to buy tickets to his movie.
Just a couple of days ago, I sat down for an interview with Zack London, the artist behind the indie animation channel Gossip Goblin. On December 4th, Zack is doing something unprecedented: he’s releasing Gods Don’t Give Gifts, the world’s first independently produced, feature-length AI-animated film, onto global movie theater screens through a grassroots theatrical rollout and international sales with AGC. He built that movie not with a blank check, but with sweat equity, traditional illustration roots, and a scrappy team of paid voice actors, Foley artists, and colorists working crazy hours.
Do you know what Zack told me during our interview? He had his tickets booked to see Wildwood in theaters, too. We are hoping for its success.
Neither of us sees this as an either-or, zero-sum war. Zack and I both revere the agonizing beauty of stop-motion. We love puppets, we love miniatures, and we love the human thumbprint. We don’t want stop-motion to vanish; we want it to thrive. But we also recognize that the theatrical ecosystem doesn’t have an endless pipeline of billionaire heirs willing to fund niche auteur projects at an astronomical loss. If the only movies “permitted” to reach a theater screen are those with a nine-figure corporate or inherited bankroll, then 99% of original human voices will be permanently shut out of cinema.
I believe that Fathom Entertainment understands this shift even if the Hollywood trades don’t. Theaters are waking up to the harsh reality that legacy studios are not their friends. Hollywood spent years actively trying to bypass theater chains, gutting windows in a desperate bid to hoard streaming profits, and filling the remaining multiplex slots with formulaic, procedural CGI slop. Exhibitors need distinct, original, risk-taking programming if they want to survive.
Fathom’s release of Wildwood proves that audiences will still show up for uncompromised, singular vision on a grand canvas. For that reason, I will be paying close attention to what they announce next. They seem to have their finger on the pulse of what’s to come. The long-term survival of the big screen cannot rest solely on the rare, high-budget anomalies bankrolled by the Fortune 500.
The real future of theatrical risk is a “both-and” horizon: celebrate the rare, handcrafted masterpieces like Wildwood whenever they grace a screen, but simultaneously throw the doors wide open to the rogue independent wave of hybrid and AI-empowered storytellers. We are the ones doing the heavy lifting in garages and home studios, armed with singular voices, small budgets, and the audacity to build without waiting for a billionaire’s blessing.
Christopher Moonlight is an animator, special effects artist, and the director of the ‘Award This’ winning movie, The Quantum Terror. His upcoming animated sci-fi adventure, Escape From Planet Omega-12, combines traditional film-making special effects with AI to create something never seen before in independent film. You can follow the behind-the-scenes, including tutorials, tips, and tricks, on his YouTube Channel, Substack, and christophermoonlight.productions website.
