Juan Escalante

The guy who founded Nike owns a movie studio that's lost money for almost 20 years straight. In two weeks it's going to lose a whole lot more, and he genuinely does not care. Phil Knight is worth around $35 billion. He bought a small animation shop in Portland, renamed it Laika, put $180 million in before it released a single frame, and handed it to his son Travis to run. Travis directed Wildwood himself. The losses are wild when you line them up. Missing Link cost $102 million and made $26.6 million worldwide. It won the Golden Globe for best animated film anyway. Any normal studio shuts down after a miss that size. Laika went and spent the next seven years building a 140-minute PG-13 stop-motion epic, the longest and most expensive thing they've ever tried. And stop motion is brutal work. Animators move puppets by hand, 24 frames for every second of film. A good week gets you a few seconds of usable footage. That's why a Laika movie costs $100 million while CGI studios make theirs for a fraction, and why nobody else in Hollywood will touch the format at this scale. So what is Laika, really? A patron deal, the same setup that got the Sistine Chapel painted. The Medici never asked Michelangelo to hit quarterly numbers, and Knight isn't asking Wildwood to open at $40 million. Here's the part I love. Every other animated movie this year had to survive a studio balance sheet to get made. Wildwood just had to convince one 88-year-old man in Oregon that American stop motion shouldn't die. So when the opening number comes in and the internet calls it a bomb, keep in mind the only number that's ever mattered at Laika is whether Phil Knight is still writing checks.