San Francisco Bay Area • October 2026. Forgotten Island Hit Me in the Feels: A Bay Area Fil-Am Review and the Box Office vs. Lilo & Stitch. forgotten island review, dreamworks filipino mythology movie, h.e.r. vallejo, liza soberano santa clara, forgotten island box office, lilo & stitch comparison, fil-am movie, bay area filipino american, 10/6.

FILM • FIL-AM CULTURE • OCTOBER 2026

Forgotten Island Hit Me in the Feels: A Bay Area Fil-Am Review

Two Fil-Ams born in the Bay Area, one Vallejo-born critic in my own family, and a box office that opened far below Lilo & Stitch. Here is why I'm backing this one anyway.

PinoyBuilt illustration for Forgotten Island.

I caught Forgotten Island today, and I'll say it up front: I'm biased. I was born in the Philippines and left at nine, so I grew up with a lot of its themes. One of the two leads is named Jo, which is also what my close relatives call me. (Everyone else gets Jonjo.) Of course it hit me in the feels.

My bunso, Chesca, who was born in Vallejo, rated it between 3 and 3.5 stars out of 4, or an 80 out of 100. Her one note: there was too much going on. She's allowed. That's one movie and two honest reactions in one family, and I want both on the record before I get to the box office, because the numbers are not as kind as the reviews.

📌 Did You Know? Both leads of Forgotten Island were born in the San Francisco Bay Area: H.E.R. in Vallejo and Liza Soberano in Santa Clara. And the film and Lilo & Stitch both carried reported production budgets of $80 million.

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🇵🇭 Tagalog Word of the Day alaala — ah-LAH-ah-lah
Memory, remembrance, and also a keepsake you hold onto. Nakali is an island that eats alaala. Jo and Raissa spend the film trying to protect theirs.

What Forgotten Island Is About

Set in the Philippines in the 1990s, the film follows two childhood friends, Jo and Raissa, who promise to stay close forever. After high school, Raissa is getting ready to move to the United States for college, and Jo tries to talk her out of it. Then a portal opens and drops them on Nakali, a forgotten island where memories fade the longer you stay. To get home, they have to escape before they forget each other.

Jo is Josephine Cleopatra "Jo" Yuson, voiced by H.E.R.: Raissa's loud, defiant best friend and a gifted comic-book artist. Liza Soberano voices Raissa, and Lea Salonga voices the Manananggal. Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado wrote and directed it for DreamWorks Animation. Its flashback scenes switch to anime-influenced 2D animation made by Manila-based studio Snipple Animation, a nod to the long history of Philippine studios working on outsourced anime.

To My Non-Filipino Friends

You don't need a glossary. At its core, this movie is about family and friendship, and what people will do to keep the ones they love from slipping away. You don't need to know a manananggal from a kapre to follow it. And if you came for the music, a Grammy-winning artist from Vallejo, California, is among the performers on the soundtrack.

Two Fil-Ams, Both Born in the Bay Area

H.E.R. was born Gabriella Sarmiento Wilson on June 27, 1997, in Vallejo, to a Filipina mother and an African American father, and she was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a Grammy winner, and here she is, a Vallejo kid carrying a Philippine story onto a DreamWorks screen. Shoutout to the 707.

Her co-lead, Liza Soberano, was born Hope Elizabeth Soberano on January 4, 1998, in Santa Clara, California, to a Filipino father from Pangasinan and an American mother from San Jose. She moved to the Philippines at ten, built her career there, and returned to California in 2022 to pursue acting in Hollywood. Two Fil-Ams from the Bay Area voicing best friends in a film built on Philippine mythology. That alone is worth a ticket.

The Box Office, Plainly

Now the hard part. Both films carried reported production budgets of $80 million, which makes Disney's 2002 Lilo & Stitch a fair yardstick: an original animated film built around an island culture and an unconventional family. Everything below is domestic (U.S. and Canada) and in unadjusted dollars.

Measure	Forgotten Island (2026)	Lilo & Stitch (2002)
Production budget (reported)	$80 million	$80 million
Opening weekend	About $13.0 million	$35.26 million
Opening rank	No. 5	No. 2
Opening theaters	3,548	3,191
Per-theater average, opening	Roughly $3,600 to $3,700	$11,050
Second weekend	About $7.2 million	$21.52 million
Second-weekend rank	No. 6	No. 3
Second-weekend drop	Roughly 44 to 45 percent	39 percent
Total through second Sunday	About $23.6 million	$77.09 million

Forgotten Island's opening was first reported as an estimated $12.8 million; later reports round it to $13.0 million. Its second-weekend figures are as of October 6 and may be revised.

Lilo & Stitch opened in fewer theaters and earned nearly three times as much. It also held better in weekend two, keeping about 61 percent of its opening against roughly 55 to 56 percent for Forgotten Island. By their second Sundays, Lilo & Stitch had banked about $77.1 million to Forgotten Island's $23.6 million. The Numbers lists its final domestic total at about $145.8 million, or roughly $300 million in today's dollars.

Forgotten Island also missed pre-release tracking of $20 million to $30 million from Box Office Pro, and TheWrap counted its opening among the five lowest in DreamWorks Animation history. Box Office Pro had already flagged the marketing push as thin. Abroad, TheWrap reported a $20.6 million worldwide opening, including a $1.5 million opening in the Philippines that topped the premiere of The Odyssey there.

Now the scores. When I checked Rotten Tomatoes on October 6, Forgotten Island showed 95 percent from critics and 95 percent from audiences. Lilo & Stitch showed 86 and 78. So the money and the praise point in opposite directions: better reviews than the original, and a far smaller opening. That gap points to reach, not quality, and the thin marketing is one plausible reason, though not necessarily the only one. I don't have audience-demographic data for either film, so I won't guess who bought the tickets.

Why I'm Showing Up Anyway

A second weekend is a number, not a verdict. But studios read those numbers when they decide what to make next. That part is my view, not a statistic. If you want more Filipino stories made at this scale, buy the ticket, bring the family, and text a tita. Let's support our mga kababayan. That's kapwa in practice: the story belongs to all of us, and so does the job of showing up for it.

I keep thinking about the premise: an island that feeds on memories, and two friends racing to hold onto theirs. When my sister and I got to America, we pledged never to forget our Tagalog. I was nine. Forgetting is a quiet threat the diaspora knows well, and a DreamWorks film that fights it with Philippine myths, Filipino animators, and two Bay Area-born Fil-Am leads is one I'm proud to be biased about.

Sources

• Wikipedia: Forgotten Island (plot, cast, production, soundtrack)
• Wikipedia: H.E.R. and Britannica: H.E.R. (birthplace, parentage)
• Wikipedia: Liza Soberano (birthplace, parentage, career)
• The Numbers: Lilo & Stitch (2002) (weekends, budget, theaters, final gross)
• The Numbers: Weekend Box Office, September 25, 2026
• The Numbers: Daily Box Office, October 2, 2026 and Box Office Mojo: October 2, 2026
• TheWrap: Forgotten Island box office analysis (worldwide and Philippine opening, DreamWorks comparison)
• Box Office Pro: Long Range Forecast, September 25, 2026 (pre-release tracking)
• World of Reel: Forgotten Island opening and budget
• Rotten Tomatoes scores for both films as checked by J.F.R. Perseveranda on October 6, 2026

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J.F.R. Perseveranda

J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.

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