Universal Pictures today announced that Dog Man, the upcoming feature from DreamWorks Animation adapted from the kids’ graphic novels by Dav Pilkey (Captain Underpants), will be high-tailing it to theaters a year from now — Friday, January 31, 2025. The project was announced in December 2020.
The slot had been previously reserved for an “Untitled DreamWorks Animation Film,” and is spaced comfortably between family-friendly toon competition from an untitled Disney animation release in November 2024 and the Smurfs musical in February 2025.
Dog Man reunites Pilkey with six-time Emmy-winning director Peter Hastings (Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness), who exec produced the Captain Underpants TV series and specials (2018-2020) for DreamWorks Animation. Karen Foster (Spirit Untamed) is the new movie’s producer.
The film will center on the titular hybrid hero, who is born after a human police officer and a dog are injured together on the job, and are stitched together in a life-saving, history-making surgery. With a nose for justice and a weakness for chasing squirrels, Dog Man doggedly pursues the feline supervillain Petey the Cat … until the arrival of the adorable kitten, Lil Petey, changes their dynamic.
A spin-off of Captain Underpants, imagined as a creation by that series’ imaginative protagonists George and Harold, the Dog Man graphic novels debuted in 2016 through Scholastic, with the 12th book Dog Man: The Scarlet Shedder due in March. The stories have been translated into 45 languages and sold more than 60 million copies in print and, in their turn, launching the bestseller spinoff Cat Kid Comic Club in 2020.
[Source: Deadline]
