Here's the most frustrating sentence in movie news: almost everybody who saw it loved it, and almost nobody saw it. That's Forgotten Island after its first weekend. The people who bought tickets gave it an A CinemaScore, reported as the strongest grade of the weekend. Rotten Tomatoes has it in the mid-90s with both critics and audiences. And it still opened fifth, with about $12.8 million, behind an Avengers rerelease and three other movies. I've been chewing on that gap since Sunday afternoon.
I wrote about its reviews on opening day and said the box office would decide whether it mattered beyond the score. So far the box office hasn't followed the reviews. So this is the sequel to that piece: what actually happened, whether the word "flop" is fair, what I think went wrong, and what would have to happen for this movie to end up a success story anyway.
One thing up front. This is an analysis of reported box office numbers and audience polling, not a review, and every projection in here is my own math on public figures. My opinions are marked as such.
The Essentials
- Forgotten Island opened to an estimated $12.8 million in the U.S. and Canada, fifth place, from 3,548 theaters. Worldwide it stood at about $20.6 million after the first weekend.
- Its reported budget is $80 million. Forecasts before the weekend ran from roughly $15 million to about $20 million, so it landed under them.
- Audiences liked it a lot: an A CinemaScore, about 96% positive on PostTrak, and 95% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. In the Philippines it set a DreamWorks Animation opening record.
- My take: the calendar, a thin kids' audience and an unfamiliar story all hurt it, and I ranked each one below. The second weekend, Oct. 2 to 4, is the real test, and I laid out exactly which numbers would make me relax or worry.
Is Forgotten Island a flop? The opening weekend scoreboard
Short answer: it's a soft opening, not a verdict. A flop is what you call a movie after its run is over, and this one has barely started. But the start is undeniably weak for a film that cost a reported $80 million before marketing, and that's the part nobody should sugarcoat. Here's everything I could verify, in one place:
The number I keep rereading isn't the total. It's Saturday. It beat Friday by about 15%, which is the shape you'd expect from a family movie people are actually enjoying, and Sunday came in around 30% below Saturday. One weekend can't prove anything, but that's not the daily pattern of a movie people are running away from. The audience that showed up was happy. There just wasn't enough of it.
Why did a movie with an A CinemaScore open so low? Three suspects
An A CinemaScore tells you the people in the room liked the movie. It says nothing about how many people were in the room. So the useful question isn't "was the movie good?" but "why was the room so small?" I can see three possible culprits, and I'm going to grade each one.
Suspect 1: The calendar
Late September isn't a family-movie holiday. Compare it with the last movie from the same directors: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish opened to $12.4 million on the weekend of Dec. 23, 2022, and then rose 35% to $16.8 million the next weekend, according to The Numbers, with schools out for winter break. Forgotten Island gets no such cushion. It has ordinary school weeks ahead of it.
It also opened into an unusually crowded room. The four movies ahead of it were Avengers: Endgame Encore at $26 million, Resident Evil at $23.3 million, Heart of the Beast at $20 million and Primetime at about $19 million, and none of them was a traditional kids' movie. Deadline called it the second-best late-September weekend ever for the marketplace, at roughly $122 million total. That's great news for theaters. But when the whole market is loud, the quiet movie is the one that gets lost, and Deadline noted that a family animated title is normally the strongest thing in this slot.
Suspect 2: The kids weren't dragging their parents
Family movies open on kids. Deadline's audience breakdown put the "nag factor" among kids under 12, meaning how badly they say they want to go, at 63%, which it called low, and the crowd skewed about 60% female to 40% male. Separately, The Rebel Yellow reported that Asian moviegoers made up the largest single share of the opening audience. Put those together and you get a movie that pleased the people who found it but didn't break out into the general family audience.
Here's my read, and it's an opinion, not something the polling says: the story of two teenage best friends drifting apart is a little older-skewing than the usual Saturday-morning-cartoon pitch. It's PG, it's a friendship drama in fantasy clothes, and I suspect it speaks to teens and parents more than to a seven-year-old with a remote. That's a wonderful thing for a movie to be. It's just harder to sell.
Suspect 3: Nobody knew what it was
This is the one I feel strongest about, and it's also the hardest to prove, so take it as my opinion. Original animation has about thirty seconds to explain itself. A robot stranded on an island is easy. A story built on Philippine mythology, with a character based on the manananggal, a figure from Filipino folklore, is a much bigger ask for a family in Ohio that has never heard the word. In Manila, the movie didn't need explaining, and it opened to a record P97.24 million, the biggest debut ever for a DreamWorks Animation film in the country and the largest opening for a non-franchise animated movie there. FanBolt made the same point sharply: the specificity that American marketing couldn't turn into ticket sales was, in the Philippines, the entire pitch.
Look at the forecast miss, too. The Boxoffice Company's Daniel Loria had it around $20 million. It landed roughly $7 million under that. When an audience that already knows the material shows up in force and the general audience doesn't, the gap is usually about awareness, not quality.
So here's how I'd rank the suspects:
Most guilty, in my opinion. The movie was loved by the people who understood what it was. The problem was reaching everyone else.
Partly guilty. A crowded, adult-heavy weekend with no holiday runway made everything harder, but it can't explain a miss this size on its own.
A contributor, not the main cause. Interest from kids under 12 was soft, but that looks more like a symptom of the marketing problem than a separate one.
Forgotten Island vs. The Wild Robot and Puss in Boots: my multiple ledger
The reason I'm not writing this movie off is a simple number: the multiple, which is a movie's final domestic gross divided by its opening weekend. Family animation is famous for legs, and the multiples for DreamWorks movies vary wildly. Here are five recent ones, with the last column being my own math:
| Movie | Opening | Final domestic | My multiple |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Wild Robot (2024) | Opening$35.8M | Final domestic$144.6M | My multiple4.0x |
| Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) | Opening$12.4M | Final domestic$186.1M | My multiple15.0x |
| The Bad Guys 2 (2025) | Opening$22.0M | Final domestic$82.6M | My multiple3.8x |
| Captain Underpants (2017) | Opening$23.9M | Final domestic$73.9M | My multiple3.1x |
| Turbo (2013) | Opening$21.3M | Final domestic$83.0M | My multiple3.9x |
Two things jump out. First, most of these land somewhere between 3x and 4x, and the average family movie does not do what Puss in Boots: The Last Wish did. That one earned about 15 times its opening on its way to roughly $186 million domestic and around $480 million worldwide, and it's an outlier I'd never bet on. Second, look at The Wild Robot. It opened to nearly triple Forgotten Island's number and still finished at about 4x. Even the movie everybody points to as proof that original animation works didn't multiply that dramatically.
Now apply those same multiples to $12.8 million. This isn't a forecast. It's a what-if table, so you can see where the reasonable range sits:
| Scenario | Multiple | Domestic total |
|---|---|---|
| Captain Underpants pace | Multiple3.1x | Forgotten Island domesticabout $40M |
| Bad Guys 2 pace | Multiple3.8x | Forgotten Island domesticabout $48M |
| Wild Robot pace | Multiple4.0x | Forgotten Island domesticabout $52M |
| Puss in Boots pace | Multiple15.0x | Forgotten Island domesticabout $192M |
Read that table honestly: the realistic middle is about $40 million to $52 million domestic. The $190 million row is what I'd call a miracle scenario, and I'm not counting on it. But even the realistic range is a long way from the $12.8 million headline number, and that's the part the "it bombed!" posts on social media skip.
Can Forgotten Island still make its money back? My rough math
Here's where I try to be an adult about it. A $40 million to $52 million domestic finish sounds fine until you look at the cost. Theaters keep roughly half of ticket sales, as Variety noted, and studios often get less overseas, so a simple rule of thumb says a movie needs to earn about twice its production budget just to cover that budget. With $80 million reported, that's around $160 million worldwide, and that's before any marketing money, which studios don't disclose.
How do the domestic scenarios translate? The Wild Robot finished with about 43% of its total from the U.S. and Canada, and Puss in Boots was around 38%. If Forgotten Island splits the same way, a $40 million to $52 million domestic total works out to roughly $90 million to $135 million worldwide. That's my back-of-the-envelope illustration, not studio accounting, and the Philippines and other markets could nudge it. But the honest read is this: in the realistic scenarios, I don't think Forgotten Island gets to break-even in theaters alone. It would need a true Puss in Boots run to do it.
Does that make it a failure? Not to me. Theatrical is only one part of what a movie earns, and a well-loved animated film keeps earning for years at home. Universal has also had an enormous year, having become the first studio to pass $5 billion worldwide this year, as I covered in my piece on its record run, so a single quiet opening isn't going to hurt it. I'd call this a disappointing launch of a good movie, not the end of the story.
The second weekend cheat sheet (Oct. 2 to 4)
The percentage drop from the opening weekend is the cleanest early read on word of mouth, so here's the scorecard. I built the thresholds from The Wild Robot, which dropped roughly 47% in its second weekend (it made a little under $19 million after opening to about $36 million, per Collider) and still finished at about 4x:
A drop of 35% or less. That would put it ahead of The Wild Robot's pace and tell me the A CinemaScore is doing real work.
A drop of 35% to 47%. That's Wild Robot territory. Not thrilling, but it keeps the 3x to 4x scenarios alive.
A drop of more than 47% would suggest the opening was mostly the built-in audience, and that the general family crowd isn't coming.
My own guess, and it's only a hunch, is about $7.5 million, in a range of $6.5 million to $8.5 million. That's a drop of roughly 41%. The wild card is the competition. Digger and Verity both open in North America on Friday, Oct. 2, but both are aimed at adults, so I don't think they take a big bite from families. I wrote about them in my Digger preview and my Verity breakdown.
Here's the piece of good news that I think is underrated. According to Deadline, Forgotten Island is the only fresh family option in theaters until Warner Bros.' animated The Cat in the Hat arrives on Nov. 6. That's five straight weekends where any parent looking for something to take a kid to has exactly one fresh choice. A movie people love, with a clear lane and no direct competition, is the recipe for exactly the kind of slow build that Puss in Boots pulled off.
Should you see Forgotten Island in theaters? A quick guide
This part isn't about my opinion of the movie. It's a guide, built from critics' reviews, audience scores, the premise and the reported 108-minute runtime, for deciding whether the big screen is worth it for you. I can't speak to how scary any specific moment might be for very young kids, so if that's your concern, check a parent-review site before you go.
- You have kids around 8 or older, or teens, and you want a family movie that isn't a sequel.
- You're Filipino or Filipino American, or you want a story that treats that culture with real specificity. The reception in Manila is the strongest signal I found.
- You care about original animation staying in theaters. Opening-weekend numbers are how studios decide what to greenlight next.
- You have very young kids and want to check parent reviews first.
- You mostly watch at home. I couldn't find a streaming date, so there's no rush to guess.
My verdict: a C-minus launch for a much better movie
Everything about how audiences and critics received Forgotten Island says the movie works. Everything about how many people showed up says the marketing and timing didn't. I'm grading only the second part, because that's what the box office actually measures.
What stands out to me is what the movie already has. Look at what this movie already has: a record opening in the Philippines, a genuine A from the people who saw it, and a lane to itself for more than a month. That's not a dead movie. That's a movie in the middle of a comeback that hasn't happened yet.
If the second weekend holds, I think we'll look back on this opening the way we look back on Puss in Boots: a scary Sunday that didn't mean what people thought. If it doesn't, then the lesson isn't that audiences hate originals. It's that a movie needs the world to know what it is before it opens, and that's a lesson worth learning either way.
Forgotten Island questions people keep searching
Is Forgotten Island a box office flop?
Not yet, but the start is weak. It opened to an estimated $12.8 million in the U.S. and Canada against a reported $80 million budget, below forecasts. A final verdict depends on its second weekend and beyond.
How much did Forgotten Island make opening weekend?
About $12.8 million domestically, in fifth place, plus about $7.8 million from 31 international markets, for roughly $20.6 million worldwide.
What is Forgotten Island's budget?
Reported at $80 million, according to outlets including TheWrap and The Numbers. Marketing costs aren't public.
What CinemaScore did Forgotten Island get?
An A, reported as the strongest CinemaScore of its opening weekend.
What is Forgotten Island's Rotten Tomatoes score?
Around 95% from critics and 97% from audiences, as of the reports I found on Sept. 28. Scores move, so check the site for the latest.
Who is in the cast of Forgotten Island?
H.E.R. and Liza Soberano voice the two best friends, Jo and Raissa, with Dolly de Leon and Lea Salonga among the voice cast. Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado directed it.
Is Forgotten Island based on Filipino mythology?
Yes. It's an original story inspired by Philippine mythology and folklore, including the manananggal, a creature from Filipino folklore.
Did Forgotten Island do well in the Philippines?
Yes. It opened to P97.24 million, the biggest debut ever for a DreamWorks Animation film in the country and the largest opening there for a non-franchise animated movie, according to reports from Sept. 28.
How long is Forgotten Island?
About 108 minutes, according to FanBolt.
When will Forgotten Island be on streaming?
I couldn't find an announced streaming date. It's still in theaters.
