Long Range Forecast: DreamWorks Animation’s DOG MAN Takes Aim at the Winter Family Market

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Long Range Forecast — January 31, 2025

Dog Man | Universal

Domestic Opening Weekend Range: $25M – $35M

Based on a popular offshoot of Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants franchise—originally a series of graphic novels for the elementary school crowd before being made into 2017’s Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie—Dog Man is the first wide-release children’s movie hitting theaters in 2025, a fact that bodes well for its box office chances as family fare holdovers from the holidays continue to lose steam.

Moana 2 and Mufasa: The Lion King will be heading into their tenth and seventh weekends, respectively, when Dog Man opens at the tail end of January—and though our forecasting panel doesn’t expect Dog Man to match Moana 2‘s nine-figure opening, an debut at higher end of the predicted range would put it roughly in line with Mufasa‘s $35.4M. Though Dog Man has nowhere near the name recognition of Mufasa among general audiences, the popularity of the source material—about a police officer and his pet dog who get fused together following an injury—among young readers should boost family attendance.

Strong box office could mean the resurgence of a franchise for DreamWorks Animation, which made the first (and, to-date, only) Captain Underpants movie for 20th Century Fox—though, by the time it was released, DreamWorks Animation had been acquired by NBCUniversal. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie‘s box office performance ($23.8M domestic opening, $73.9M domestic total) was solid, but the film lingered in the shadow of fellow DreamWorks/Fox collab The Boss Baby ($50.1M domestic opening, $175M domestic total), which had come out two months prior and eventually got a sequel (2021’s The Boss Baby: Family Business; $16M domestic opening, $57.3M domestic total) under Universal.

Since becoming part of the Universal family, DreamWorks Animations’ five biggest domestic hits have been:

• Kung Fu Panda 4 ($57.9M domestic opening, $193.5M domestic total)
• Puss in Boots: The Last Wish ($12.4M domestic opening, $186M domestic total)
• How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World ($55M domestic opening, $160.7 domestic total)
• The Wild Robot ($35.7M domestic opening, $143.2M domestic total)
• Trolls Band Together ($30M domestic opening, $102.9M domestic total)

Of those, none came out in January, and only two (How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda) came out in Q1. In recent years, the vast majority of animated family films coming out in January have been re-releases (Soul, Spider-Verse: Across the Spider-Verse, et al). Among family-oriented live-action/animation hybrids released in January are 2020’s Dolittle ($21.8M domestic opening, $77M domestic total) and 2018’s Paddington 2 ($11M domestic opening, $40.8M domestic total). It’s the third Paddington movie, titled Paddington in Peru, that will pose the biggest threat to Dog Man‘s holdover box office, as it comes out in North America on Valentine’s Day, giving Dog Man a solid two weeks with basically no competition in terms of family titles.

Tracking Updates [as of January 10]