The founder of Nike owns a movie studio where a full week of work produces one second of film. It loses money on almost every release, and he's been quietly paying for it for over 20 years. Phil Knight bought a struggling Portland animation shop in 2002, and his son Travis started there as an animator. The studio became LAIKA, the one behind Coraline, and Travis worked his way up to CEO. He's directing the new movie, Wildwood, himself. The economics are brutal. Coraline came out in 2009 and is still their biggest earner. Every film since has made less than the one before it, and every single one got nominated for an Oscar. Missing Link cost $102 million, brought back $26 million, and won the Golden Globe anyway. Any normal studio shuts down after that. They went bigger. Here's why it takes so long. Stop motion runs at 24 frames a second, so an animator physically adjusts a puppet, snaps a photo, and does it again, 24 times, to earn one second of screen time. On Wildwood's hardest shots that came out to 1 to 4 finished seconds per week. 49 animators, 136 handbuilt sets, over 200 puppets, 231 weeks of shooting. Four and a half years for a movie that runs about 5,700 seconds. An AI video model now generates that much footage in under a minute. Which is the whole point of doing it this way in 2026. Video got basically free this year, and the hardest footage on earth to produce suddenly looks like nothing else out there. Phil Knight could park that money anywhere. He keeps choosing the slowest art form humans ever invented, and in 11 days we all get to see what four and a half years of it looks like.