How 'Hoodwinked!' Changed January Cinema Forever

Per Metacritic, the second-best reviewed new release movie of 2006 was The Queen. With all due respect to that perfunctory fawning look at The Royal Family, nearly two decades later, nothing from that movie has proved as lastingly influential as Hoodwinked! That Cory Edwards directorial effort didn’t score as many Oscar nominations as The Queen, true. However, did that Helen Mirren star vehicle feature an end credits song like “Critters Have Feelings” that contained such unforgettably bizarre lines like “beneath the stars one night/I met the woodchuck of my dreams” or “I live on a leaf/and I crawl because she makes me”? Or a goat that can only sing after a witch put a spell on him 37 years ago?

More relevantly, The Queen didn’t change the box office landscape anywhere near as profoundly as Hoodwinked! This feature wasn’t just a tidy sleeper hit in mid-January 2006. It carved out a new corridor of the year where family films could debut. Countless post-2006 family feature hits wouldn’t have reached their lucrative heights without Hoodwinked! paving the way.

Let’s travel back to 2005 for a second. Shake all the hit Mariah Carey and Lifehouse songs out of your head. Now, look at these realities of the theatrical cinema landscape. Animated movies have been a big deal for movie studios for eons now. However, there are few release date opportunities to launch these costly titles. The film industry perceives only a handful of summertime weekends, Thanksgiving, or Christmas as ideal launchpads for family-skewing animated features. That’s how you end up with situations like Thanksgiving 1991. That’s when Beauty and the Beast and An American Tail: Fievel Goes West both debuted within days of each other. Ditto The Rugrats Movie and A Bug’s Life, both debuting over Thanksgiving 1998, or Pokemon: The First Movie and Toy Story 2 both launching in November 1999.

Still, come 2006, this release strategy was in need of a change. For one thing, massive hit Ice Age in March 2002 revealed the potential of springtime as a family movie launchpad. For another, 2006 was when every studio would try to mimic the success of Shrek with various irreverent animated comedies. Only three new CG-animated movies opened in wide theatrical release in 2002. Thirteen would premiere in wide release in 2006. Not all of them could open in the four-ish release slots that animated family movies had typically opened in. Some would have to go to other, more unorthodox places on the calendar. Like, say, January.

Back in 2005, nobody would’ve thought of January as the ideal place to premiere Hoodwinked! Before 2006, only seven films in history had cracked $20+ million opening weekends in January. Family movies were scarce in this month save for early 2000s talking animal titles Snow Dogs andKangaroo Jack. Both of those features made money. However, neither suggested fully animated movies should suddenly corner the Martin Luther King Jr. three-day weekend in January. The dearth of family movies opening over that holiday frame immediately after Jack indicated Hollywood’s thinking hadn’t changed. Those two live-action titles were considered weird box office flukes. They certainly weren’t indicators of January being a place where family movies can thrive.

Even Hoodwinked! distributor The Weinstein Company seemed to recognize this. After all, this fairy tale comedy was originally set for a Christmas Day 2005 wide release launch. It was later delayed to January 13, 2006 release date, where it opened to $12.4 million. A lower bow than both Snow Dogs and Kangaroo Jack, Hoodwinked! still left all other animated January debuts in the dust. Teacher’s Pet: The Movie’s $2.4 million bow from 2004 couldn’t hope to compete! Better yet, its resilient legs in the weeks afterward revealed a new benefit to opening these titles in January. A new animated family movie in June will immediately have to deal with competing tentpoles. Hoodwinked!, meanwhile, quadrupled its domestic opening weekend. It eventually secured a $51.38 million domestic total thanks to the lack of immediate family movie competition in January 2006. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed Hoodwinked! was queen.

In hindsight, that was an advantage for Hoodwinked!. This comedy featured an oddball narrative structure more reminiscent of Go or Rashomon than Barnyard: The Original Party Animals. Releasing this title in the more competitive landscape of July or November 2006 would’ve led to Hoodwinked! getting passed over for more conventional-looking animated family fare. In January 2006, though, there were no other fresh animated movies in the marketplace aimed at this demographic. This ensured it stood out as something worth seeing to people while the lack of subsequent competition let word-of-mouth fester. Hoodwinked!’s animation was clunky and occasionally downright hideous even back in 2006, but it did have artistic charms. Those would be easier for the public to hear about in an unorthodox release date like mid-January 2006.

Enough people ended up enjoying the creative upsides of Hoodwinked! that its eventual domestic total still looked remarkable even when the dust settled on 2006’s cavalcade on animated family movies. The micro-budget Hoodwinked!, inevitably, made considerably less than Cars, Ice Age: The Meltdown, and Over the Hedge. However, it left the higher-profile July 2006 animated feature The Ant Bully in the dust. It also made just $13 million less than the DreamWorks Animation feature Flushed Away, which opened in a more “optimal” early November release slot. Opening in more conventional spots for animated family movies hadn’t bolstered those box office misfires. Nor did embracing an “unusual” mid-January launchpad capsize Hoodwinked!

In the years that followed Hoodwinked!, live-action and animated family movies alike began to exploit the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend as a go-to frame to garner audience attention without dealing with an excess of attention. Even something as dismal as 2016’s Norm of the North could secure $9.37 million over its opening four-day weekend in this timeframe. Meanwhile, eight years after the independently financed Hoodwinked! made big numbers in January 2006, The Nut Job opened to a robust $25.68 million four-day gross over MLK weekend 2014. That was by far the biggest domestic launch up to that point for an independent animated movie. It’s hard to imagine that record getting shattered by such a middling feature anywhere else but mid-January.

The Weinstein Company would even return to this holiday frame for the domestic launch of Paddington. Like Hoodwinked!, Paddington was originally set for a Christmas Day U.S. bow before getting delayed a few weeks. A year later, DreamWorks Animation would launch Kung Fu Panda 3 over the final weekend of January 2016. This date choice was capitalizing on Chinese New Year rather than trying to make Hoodwinked! 2.0, granted.

However, it was still a release date choice showing how far Hollywood had come in its thinking on January as a launchpad for animated family movies. The biggest franchises around were now embracing January as a prime spot to debut animated family movies. DreamWorks Animation even initially scheduled Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie for a mid-January launch, a sign that the studio, at one point, may have been looking to dominate January the same way its titles have often cornered late March and mid-May.

Twenty years after January 2005, the last year before Hoodwinked!’s debut, the landscape of January opening weekends looks radically different. Seven January features have now had $40+ million openings, a feat once thought impossible for this month. Next year, in January 2026, Disney has some untitled film set for release over MLK weekend 2026. Paramount Pictures will release an animated movie set in the Last Airbender universe in the same month. We’re fully living in a post-Hoodwinked! world, to the point that most people don’t realize how unusual launching an animated feature in this time period used to be.

We now live in a cinematic landscape where blockbusters can emerge in any point of the year. Bad Boys installments can launch in mid-January. Marvel Cinematic Universe box office titans drop in mid-February. Heck, this year’s post-Thanksgiving “dead zone” weekend belongs to a Five Nights at Freddy’s sequel that will inevitably make boatloads of money. But that wasn’t always the case in the Hollywood. Arcane concepts of “dump months” heavily guided what movies got released where. This often made long stretches of any given year a nightmare for avid moviegoers. Hoodwinked!, though, reaffirmed that any movie can succeed anywhere.

A 4th of July weekend bow won’t suddenly turn a turkey into the next Avatar at the box office. Meanwhile, mid-January isn’t inherently going to doom a new release movie. If something looks appealing to the general public, they’ll go see it, no matter what time of the year it is. Sometimes it takes one trailblazing film to remind the world of that. Critters certainly have feelings (especially when matters involve “the woodchuck of my dreams”), but as seen by Hoodwinked!’s box office legacy, they can also change film industry norms. Surely The Queen can’t say it had the same monumental impact!