The Best Sequel to “Coraline” Is “Coraline”

The cherry blossoms in “Coraline” are popcorn. Laika’s crew popped the kernels, cooled them, spray-painted them and then painted them by hand, according to the Museum of Pop Culture and Laika.^[1] The garden lilies are silicone thimbles turned inside out. I rewatch the film as Halloween approaches, and each time I find a detail I had missed. “Coraline” is a perfect film, and it should stay a single film, with no sequel and no prequel. The handmade detail is the reason: the original already gives fans more of its world each time they return, and work this slow should not be spent reopening a finished story.

That detail is labor you can see. One crew member was hired specifically to knit miniature sweaters, using needles almost as thin as a human hair, by the same account.^[1] Focus Features,^[2] which released Henry Selick’s film as Laika’s first animated feature, says 29 animators working full time produced 90 to 100 seconds of film a week. The handwork also drives the horror. The Other Mother “gives Coraline everything she wants, until she demands the impossible in return,” as Focus puts it, and the dread comes from a handmade paradise that is slightly wrong. I love the stretch in which that paradise comes apart. Coraline walks with the cat to what Variety’s Justin Chang^[3] called “the outer reaches of this make-believe world.” The Other world, “initially a riot of treats, flowers, and splashy wonders, emerges as an insect-themed lair, a spookhouse child-trap,” as Slant’s Bill Weber^[4] put it. The paradise was never a gift. It was bait, perfect only while it might work, and the film needs no jump scares to make that toxic perfectionism frightening.

Theatergoers keep paying to see it. The original release grossed $75.3 million in North America, according to Box Office Mojo.^[5] Re-releases from 2022 to 2024 added $60.4 million worldwide. Most of that came from the 15th-anniversary run, shown in 3D and 2D, which opened at No. 5 in North America in August 2024^[6] and grossed $52.4 million worldwide. Its $33.6 million in North America equaled 45% of the original run’s North American gross, or about 30% after adjusting both dollar figures with annual-average U.S. consumer prices.^[7] Those audiences paid to see a story whose ending had been public for 15 years.

"Coraline" worldwide gross by release, millions of nominal dollars

Part of me wants a sequel, or a prequel. I want to know who the Other Mother was before Coraline found the hidden door,^[8] who the three ghost children were, and whether she ever comes back. Those grosses are what a studio would bring to a sequel meeting, and a hit could pay for Laika’s next original. Great sequels exist, too, and even Travis Knight, the president and chief executive of Laika,^[9] grants it. “I take a firm stand against sequels,” he told the filmmaker and historian John Canemaker in 2016, in a conversation excerpted by Cartoon Brew,^[10] before naming two: “The Godfather Part II” and “The Empire Strikes Back.” His stated reason is a philosophy, not a proof: Laika imagines each film as the most meaningful experience of its protagonist’s life, he said, so a sequel is either “a diminishment” or has to “crank up the volume.” The grosses show demand for the original, not that a continuation would fail. Even if one succeeded, I would rather Laika spend its production years on an unfamiliar world.

Those years are few. The “Coraline” shoot lasted more than 18 months after two years of preproduction,^[1] and Laika^[9] has released five features, starting with “Coraline,” none of them a sequel. As Knight said in that conversation,^[10] “there’s only so many films you can do.” A “Coraline 2” would take one of those few slots from an original. “Coraline” was once that original: Focus says^[2] no Hollywood studio was interested in making it until Focus partnered with Laika. And once there is one sequel, at what point do you stop? Disney^[11] and Pixar have scheduled “Toy Story 5” for June 19, 2026, and those sequels do not have to be bad for the first film to become one chapter of five. Saying no has a price, and part of it is mine: I would buy a ticket to the Other Mother’s origin story. The next miniature sweater should still go to a character nobody has met.