Universal finally has a release date for the animated Dog Man feature, Deadline reports, with a release set for Friday, January 31, 2025. Emmy winner Peter Hastings (The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants), will direct, with Karen Foster (Spirit Untamed) as producer.
Dav Pilkey’s Dog Man books have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide, and are the best selling book series in the US still stop, over the last five years or so. So why hasn’t there been a Dog Man movie? One was announced back in 2020, but there has been little word of further developments, until now.
The film will presumably cover Dog Man’s origin as a Frankensteined amalgam of a dog and a policeman who equally chases squirrels and criminals and arch nemesis, Petey the Cat. The arrival of Lil Petey, an adorable clone of Petey, upends everything.
The insanely successful Dog Man book series continues in March with Dog Man: The Scarlet Shedder the 12th book in the series. It’s also spun off into the Cat Kid Comic Club which is another chart topping blockbuster.
As mentioned, the arrival of Dog Man in animated form seems to have been long awaited. Captain Underpants, Pilkey’s previous best-selling series, was turned into a movie in 2017, Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie, a box office success which spun off into The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants an episodic series which ran for four seasons on Netflix from 2018-20,. As noted, Dog Man director Peter Hastings was heavily involved in that series as executive producer and even voice talent.
Finally, if about a year our seems very soon for an animated movie (which typically takes years and years to produce,) those sneaky folks at Universal had it on the schedule as “Untitled DreamWorks Animation Film” until now.
