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.
Arctic Dogs was originally titled as Arctic Justice: Thunder Squad and was originally acquired by Open Road Films, originally scheduled to be released on an undisclosed 2018 date.[7] The film was acquired by Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures in the United States and Canada due to its Open Road Films' bankruptcy and solely released on November 1, 2019.[8][9] Lionsgate Home Entertainment released it on DVD and Blu-ray on February 4, 2020. It made $1.3 million in total US video sales.[10]
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.[11] 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.[12][13]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 12% based on 17 reviews and an average rating of 3.8/10.[14]Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 28 out of 100 based on four critics, indicating generally unfavorable reviews.[15] 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".[12]
In 2020, it received a Canadian Cinema Editors Awards nomination for Best Editing in Animation.[16]
Aweb 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).[17] Another spin-off series titled Puffins was also released, featuring the voice of Johnny Depp as Johnny Puff.[18][19] A spin-off of Puffins, entitled Puffins Impossible, was released in April 2022, with Depp reprising his role as Puff.[20] There are also two Christmas live action/animation spin-off films titled Christmas Thieves (2021) and The Good Witch of Christmas (2022).[21][22]
