Entertainment Studios released Arctic Dogs on November 1, 2019, in Canada and the United States. The film was a major critical and commercial failure, grossing less than a fifth of its production budget of $50 million. Critics panned the film's lack of originality, humor, story, and animation quality.
Despite its reception, the film spawned a franchise, including a web series and multiple spin-off series and films.
Plot
Swifty (Jeremy Renner), an Arctic fox, works in the mailroom of the Arctic Blast Delivery Service, but he has much bigger dreams. He wishes to become a Top Dog, the Arctic's star husky couriers. To prove he can do it, he commandeers one of the sleds and delivers a mysterious package to a secret location. Once there, he stumbles onto a hidden fortress, overseen by the nefarious Otto Von Walrus (John Cleese). The blubbery evil genius commands an army of oddly polite puffin henchmen.
Swifty discovers Otto Von Walrus' villainous plan to drill beneath the snow-packed surface to unleash masses of ancient gas to melt the Arctic and become the world's supreme ruler. To stop this sinister scheme, Swifty enlists the help of his friends: P.B. (Alec Baldwin), a neurotic polar bear, Lemmy (James Franco), a scatterbrained albatross, Jade (Heidi Klum), a brainy red fox engineer and Swifty's love interest, Leopold (Omar Sy) and Bertha (also voiced by Heidi Klum), two conspiracy theorist otters and Magda (Anjelica Huston), his curmudgeonly caribou boss.
The film was announced as Arctic Justice: Thunder Squad on August 30, 2014 with AMBI themselves handling international sales.[7] The film's cast was announced on May 5, 2015. Around that time, Dimos Vrysellas was originally tapped to direct.[8] On February 14, 2017 Open Road Films acquired the North American distribution rights to the film and was originally scheduled to be released on an undisclosed 2018 date.[9] The film was acquired by Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures in the United States and Canada due to Open Road Films' bankruptcy and solely released on November 1, 2019.[10][11] Lionsgate Home Entertainment released it on DVD and Blu-ray on February 4, 2020. It made $1.3 million in total US video sales.[12]
Reception
Box office
In the United States and Canada, Arctic Dogs was released alongside Harriet, Terminator: Dark Fate and Motherless Brooklyn and was projected to gross $5–10 million from 2,835 theaters in its opening weekend.[13] It made $700,000 on its first day and ended up debuting to just $2.9 million, finishing 10th and marking the worst opening of all-time for a film playing in over 2,800 theaters.[14][15]
Critical response
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 13% based on 16 reviews and an average rating of 3.8/10.[16]Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 28 out of 100 based on four critics, indicating generally unfavorable reviews.[17] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale, while those surveyed at PostTrak gave it an overall positive score of 64% and a 41% "definite recommend".[14]
Many critics panned the film's lack of originality. The Hollywood Reporter wrote: "Lacking much in the way of humor or charm, the film [...] culminates with the sort of frenetic, action-laden climatic sequence that has become de rigueur for these offerings".[18]CinemaBlend called the film half-baked: " [...] it's [..] made excessively clear that the movie has no desire to access any depth if it [..] means slowly down the A-to-B plot in any way, and/or [...] get[s] in the way of juvenile jokes that have been tired for two decades[.]"[19]
The film's more positive reception was also not without criticism. TheWrap's William Bibbiani, noted that "[t]he story is at its best when Cleese's eccentric supervillain is on-screen. The rest of the time it's merely a functional series of events[.]" Bibbiani would go on to say that the film "[...] is a functional, distracting kids flick that's only remarkable in how unremarkable it is."[20]
In 2020, it received a Canadian Cinema Editors Awards nomination for Best Editing in Animation.[21]
Animated series and spin-off films
A web series set after the events of the film titled Arctic Friends was released in September 2020 on both Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime Video, consisting of 40 collections (160 shorts).[22] Another spin-off series titled Puffins was also released, featuring the voice of Johnny Depp as Johnny Puff.[23][24] A spin-off of Puffins, entitled Puffins Impossible, was released in April 2022, with Depp reprising his role as Puff.[25] There are also two Christmas live action/animation spin-off films titled Christmas Thieves (2021) and The Good Witch of Christmas (2022).[26][27]
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