'Wildwood' Overtakes 'Toy Story 5' in Best Animated Feature Odds

Wildwood leads the Best Animated Feature race with 97.9% odds, edging past Toy Story 5 at 96.8% on Gold Derby's combined leaderboard after the Pixar sequel had held the top spot for most of the summer and early fall. It's a narrow lead. And the voters driving it are users, not professionals.

Gold Derby's user leaderboard shows Wildwood ahead by just 1%. The site's experts and editors, by contrast, haven't jumped ship: they have both films in a dead heat at 100% at the top of their rankings. Chalk that skepticism up to Pixar's track record in this category.

Why the pros still trust the Toy Story machine

Both Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4 handily won Best Animated Feature, at the 2011 and 2020 ceremonies respectively. The fourth film beat Laika's last release, Missing Link, for the statuette. Toy Story 3 also belongs to an exclusive club: it's one of only three animated movies ever nominated for Best Picture, alongside Beauty and the Beast and Up.

For Laika, the Oregon-based stop-motion studio, the stakes are personal. Five nominations in this category. Five losses. Wildwood could finally bring the Oscar home.

How the rest of the field stacks up

The current combined leaderboard:

• Wildwood — 98.0%
• Toy Story 5 — 96.9%
• Hoppers — 80.4%
• Iron Boy — 69.2%
• Tangles — 55.7%
• Ray Gunn — 49.8%
• Forgotten Island — 21.0%
• Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom — 14.4%
• Minions and Monsters — 3.1%
• Hexed — 1.3%

Among the experts and editors, the order shifts below the top two: Iron Boy sits third at 76%, with Hoppers and Ray Gunn tied at 60%, Tangles at 52%, Forgotten Island at 32%, Shaun the Sheep at 8%, and both Minions and Monsters and The Cat in the Hat at 4%.

What could swing the race back?

The odds could flip again depending on how Wildwood performs in theaters. It opens opposite the DC Studios horror picture Clayface and, more significantly, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's inescapable phenomenon You Can See Everything. A strong box office run would widen Laika's margin; a soft one could hand the lead straight back to Pixar.

Two yet-to-screen contenders could still enter the conversation in the coming weeks: Warner Animation's The Cat in the Hat and Disney's Hexed. Neither has cracked the top of the leaderboards so far.

Right now, though, this is a two-movie race. And it only gets wilder if Wildwood takes off at the box office.