Forgotten Island gained 24 reviews in three days and nobody printed the same number twice
DreamWorks opens Forgotten Island on Friday at 100 per cent. Three outlets have published three different review counts for that score inside 72 hours, and the film it is supposedly beating has a 99 per cent built on four times the sample.
Forgotten Island opens wide on Friday carrying a perfect Rotten Tomatoes score and a claim that it is the best-reviewed film DreamWorks Animation has ever made. The score is real. The claim is a sample-size trick, and the sample has been reported three different ways this week alone.
On 21 September one outlet reported the 100 per cent as resting on 22 reviews. On the morning of 23 September Rotten Tomatoes itself showed 34. By that evening it was 46, average rating 8.10, forty-six liked and none disliked — and still not Certified Fresh.
By the time the film actually opens, none of those three numbers will be the number.
A 100 on 46 is not a bigger number than a 99 on 210
How to Train Your Dragon sits at 99 per cent from 210 reviews. That is a score that has survived a full theatrical run, a home-video cycle and fifteen years of critics revisiting it. Forgotten Island has survived a press week.
The arithmetic is unforgiving. At 46 reviews, a single negative notice takes the film to 97.9 per cent. Four negatives in the next twenty take it to 91 per cent. No DreamWorks Animation film has ever finished a wide release at 100 per cent, and the studio's own ranked list tops out with How to Train Your Dragon at 99, The Wild Robot at 97 and Chicken Run at 97.
One correction worth making to the correction: Rotten Tomatoes does not weight its studio ranking by review volume. Its guide ranks on the raw Tomatometer. So on the published methodology a 100 does outrank a 99 — which is precisely why the volume difference has to be stated in words, because the chart will not state it for you. Forgotten Island is not on that ranked list yet at all.
Three institutions, three counts of how many films DreamWorks has made
Forbes called Forgotten Island DreamWorks Animation's 50th animated feature. Wikipedia's production list states that the studio has produced 53 feature films as of 2025. Rotten Tomatoes' own ranked guide contains 50 entries.
None of these is wrong. They are counting different things: theatrical releases only, everything including streaming-exclusive titles, and everything the site has scored. The point is that a studio filmography is not a fixed number, and "the 50th" is a claim about a boundary rather than about a film.
The forecast has fallen, not fractured
- Boxoffice Pro long-range, 28 August: $20–30 million
- Boxoffice Theory, 23 September: $14–19 million
- Independent tracker Todd Thatcher: $18.2 million
These are usually presented as trackers disagreeing. They are not. They are sequential, and read in order they say something simpler and more interesting: tracking on this film dropped by roughly a third between late August and release week, while the reviews were getting better.
The comparison set is the DreamWorks mid-tier: Abominable opened to $20.6 million, The Lego Ninjago Movie $20.4 million, Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie $22.7 million, Transformers One $24.6 million. A $14–19 million debut would put a 100 per cent-reviewed film below all four.
What the film is
- Universal and DreamWorks Animation; 25 September in the United States, 23 September in the Philippines.
- Directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado.
- Set in the 1990s Philippines; two friends, Jo and Raissa, find a portal to the island of Nakali, and the price of returning home is their shared memories.
- Voice cast includes H.E.R., Liza Soberano, Lea Salonga, Dave Franco, Jenny Slate, Manny Jacinto, Dolly de Leon, Ronny Chieng and Jo Koy.
- Its 2D anime-influenced sequences were produced by Snipple Animation in Manila.
- Runtime is listed as 108 minutes in one place and 1 hour 49 minutes in another — a one-minute discrepancy that has already propagated.
- It screened as a work in progress at CinemaCon in April and at Annecy in June.
Even the Annecy reception has two versions: one account calls it a rapturous response, another specifies a five-minute standing ovation. Standing-ovation timings are, as a category, the least verifiable numbers in film journalism.
What is still unknown
The budget, which nobody publishes. The final Tomatometer, which is moving while you read this. And whether a studio that has never held 100 per cent through a wide release is about to, or whether Friday's first wave of general-audience reviews does what general-audience reviews do.
A film that earned its score in a press screening room is about to be graded by everyone else. The number on the poster will be obsolete by Sunday, which is the one thing nobody printing it has mentioned.