Travis Knight, the CEO of Laika, the animation house behind “Coraline” and “ParaNorman,” can’t shake a moment from an Oscars Nominees Luncheon in 2020.
The 52-year-old son of Nike co-founder Phil Knight was there because his stop-motion film “Missing Link” was up for best animated feature. Across the table sat a screenwriter he had long admired, and the two struck up a conversation. When Knight mentioned his movie, the writer replied: “Oh, I don’t watch any of that stuff. I just let my kids tell me what to vote for.”
Knight smiled on the outside but fumed within. “I was so deeply outraged,” he recalls. The insult stung because Knight knew it was the industry’s quiet consensus, said out loud: Animation is a babysitter.
That’s the paradox at the center of animation in 2026: The medium has never mattered more to Hollywood’s bottom line. Universal and Illumination’s “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” became the first film to cross $1 billion worldwide this year. Pixar‘s spring release “Hoppers” scored the biggest opening for an original Pixar movie since 2017’s “Coco.” And “Toy Story 5” capped the run with a $160 million domestic launch ($312 million worldwide), the best debut of any film this year and the cornerstone of Pixar’s comeback. It’s currently sitting at $879 million globally heading into its fifth weekend, and is destined to be another billion-dollar movie of 2026.
