DreamWorks Just Released Its 50th Movie. I Think It Quietly Proves the Studio Beat Pixar at the One Thing Pixar Used to Own

Fifty movies in, most studios are coasting on whatever franchise still prints money. DreamWorks Animation hit that milestone today with Forgotten Island, an original film based on Philippine mythology that nobody outside the animation press was talking about a month ago, and instead of quietly opening into a franchise slot, it opened to a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. That's not a typo, and it's not a small early sample either — it's held up well enough that even after 68 critics weighed in, it's still sitting at 96%, with a 72 on Metacritic that tells you critics didn't just like it, they actively admired it. I've spent the past few days going through the reviews, the box office landscape it's opening into, and every original animated movie DreamWorks and Pixar have released since 2022, and the story underneath the score is more interesting than the score itself.

The milestone nobody marketed, and what the movie actually is

Strip away the review score for a second, because the plot is doing more work than a lot of animated openers bother with. Forgotten Island follows Jo (voiced by H.E.R.) and Raissa (Liza Soberano), best friends since childhood in 1990s Philippines, on the last night before they're set to grow apart after graduation. They find a magical sand dollar that opens a portal to Nakali, the "forgotten island" from the stories Jo's late grandmother Lola used to tell — voiced by Dolly de Leon — and wake up on the other side with gaps in their memory, new tattoos, and, in Raissa's case, half a shaved head and the wings of a Manananggal, a figure pulled directly from Filipino folklore and voiced by Lea Salonga. The rules of the island are the whole engine of the story: the longer they stay, the more of their own friendship they forget, which turns a fantasy adventure into a genuinely effective metaphor for watching a close relationship drift as life moves people in different directions. Dave Franco, Jenny Slate, Manny Jacinto, Jo Koy and Ronny Chieng round out a voice cast that's stacked even by DreamWorks' standards.

The pedigree behind the camera matters more than most opening-weekend coverage is giving it credit for. Crawford and Mercado are the same directing team behind Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, one of the most acclaimed films DreamWorks has ever released, and producer Mark Swift — an Oscar nominee for that same film — is back as well. This isn't a first-timer's passion project getting a lucky roll of the dice. It's DreamWorks handing its 50th film, and an original one at that, to the exact people who already proved they know how to turn a mid-budget animated movie into something critics and audiences both respond to. That's a deliberate bet, not an accident, and it's part of why I don't think the 100%-to-96% score movement here is the interesting story. The interesting story is that the studio keeps making this bet correctly.

Why the representation angle here isn't just a talking point

I want to be upfront about something before I get into this, because it's easy for "representation" to become a box a review checks and moves past: Forgotten Island features the largest concentration of Filipino and Filipino-American talent ever assembled for a major Hollywood animated film, and that fact is doing real narrative work, not just casting-announcement work. The soundtrack alone pulls in H.E.R., Lea Salonga, the boy group SB19, the girl group BINI, rapper Ruby Ibarra and the late Francis Magalona, and the film had its own Philippines premiere in Manila on September 16 before opening here. That's not a marketing checklist. That's a studio treating a specific culture's mythology as worth building an entire creative apparatus around, the same way Pixar did with Mexican Día de los Muertos traditions in Coco back in 2017.

And I'd bring up Coco here on purpose, because it's the clearest precedent for what's happening with Forgotten Island, and the comparison favors DreamWorks in a way I didn't expect going in. Coco opened to a 97% on Rotten Tomatoes and went on to gross $807 million worldwide off a budget north of $175 million — proof that a culturally specific, non-Anglo story could be both a critical and commercial monster when a major studio actually commits to it instead of hedging. Forgotten Island is following the exact same playbook nine years later, for a culture — Filipino, with one of the largest diasporas in the United States — that mainstream American animation has barely touched. If the box office holds up anywhere near Coco's shape over the coming weeks, this stops being a nice review and starts being a template other studios have to reckon with.

The real story behind the score: DreamWorks vs. Pixar, ranked by me

Here's the thing nobody covering this opening weekend seems to be connecting: Forgotten Island isn't an isolated fluke, it's the fifth entry in a very specific, very recent genre — the wholly original, non-sequel, non-toy-line CG animated movie from one of the two studios that dominate this format. So instead of grading Forgotten Island against other 2026 releases in a vacuum, I pulled every original film both DreamWorks and Pixar have released theatrically since 2022, and ranked them the way I'd actually want to know them: not just by review score, but by whether the studio's bet paid off. This is the list nobody else bothered to build, and it's my own, completely subjective call.

1. 1

   The Wild Robot (2024) — DreamWorks

   98% RT · $78M budget · $335M worldwide

   The clean winner. Critics loved it, it made more than four times its budget, and it's the film every studio should be studying instead of retreating into sequels.

2. 2

   Forgotten Island (2026) — DreamWorks

   96% RT (68 critics) · Box office TBD

   I'm ranking it this high on reviews alone, since it opened today and the money isn't in yet. Ask me again Monday — I suspect it climbs to No. 1.

3. 3

   The Bad Guys (2022) — DreamWorks

   86% RT · $70M budget · $251M worldwide

   Solid, funny, and profitable more than three times over. Not a masterpiece, but exactly the kind of mid-budget original that keeps a studio's original-IP muscle alive.

4. 4

   Elio (2025) — Pixar

   83% RT · $150M budget · $154M worldwide

   Reviewed almost as well as Forgotten Island, and still lost Pixar money once marketing is factored in. This is the film that proves the score was never the problem.

5. 5

   Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (2023) — DreamWorks

   65% RT · $70M budget · $46M worldwide

   Even DreamWorks whiffs sometimes. Mixed reviews and a marketing campaign nobody saw coming turned this into the studio's own cautionary tale.

What that list actually shows, once you sit with it: Pixar's Elio proves that a great review score alone doesn't save an original movie if the budget is bloated to $150 million and the marketing doesn't show up. DreamWorks' worst outing on this list, Ruby Gillman, still cost the same $70 million as its best-reviewed hit, The Bad Guys — meaning the studio's downside risk on an original swing is a fraction of Pixar's. That's not a coincidence, and it's not really a creative difference either. It's a budgeting philosophy. DreamWorks has apparently decided original stories are worth betting on precisely because it keeps the bets small enough to survive a miss, while Pixar keeps making $150 million wagers on movies with no built-in audience and then acting surprised when a few of them don't clear that bar. Forgotten Island's budget hasn't been disclosed, but every signal — a Filipino cast this deep, a directing team this proven, a marketing push built around a real cultural premiere in Manila — points to a studio that's finally treating "original" as a genre worth funding properly instead of an afterthought squeezed in between franchise sequels.

Can a perfect score survive the most acclaimed weekend of the year?

Great reviews are only half the equation, and Forgotten Island picked a genuinely brutal weekend to prove the other half. It opens today directly against Avengers: Endgame – Encore's rerelease push, Heart of the Beast's Brad Pitt-led survival drama, and the second weekend of Zach Cregger's Resident Evil reboot — three films that are themselves reviewing well, all competing for the same Friday night audience. That's an unusually stacked lineup for late September, and it means Forgotten Island doesn't just need good reviews, it needs parents and families to actively choose an original story with no built-in brand recognition over films riding decades of franchise loyalty or a beloved dog. Animated originals have historically struggled in exactly this kind of crowded frame — it's the same trap that helped sink Elio in 2025, released the same week as a more heavily marketed franchise title.

My honest read: the reviews give Forgotten Island a real shot at the kind of word-of-mouth legs that a mediocre opening weekend can't kill, the way The Wild Robot built into a $335 million hit despite never dominating a single weekend outright. Families tend to move slower than opening-weekend box office trackers want them to, and a 96% score with this much cultural specificity behind it is exactly the kind of thing that gets recommended parent-to-parent over the following month, long after the tracking numbers from this Friday are forgotten. I'd rather be wrong about Forgotten Island being a slow-burn hit than right about it getting buried by a rerelease and a dog movie, and on the evidence of everything DreamWorks has gotten right since 2022, I don't think I am.