{"id":412639,"date":"2026-04-23T00:40:18","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T00:40:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/412639\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T00:40:18","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T00:40:18","slug":"air-bud-returns-is-an-indie-movie-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/412639\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Air Bud Returns’ Is an Indie Movie Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

How can a franchise that is about to have 15 movies in its catalog and has been Disney IP for decades actually call itself an indie film<\/a>? Because there ain\u2019t no rule that says a movie about a dog playing basketball can\u2019t be an indie film.<\/p>\n

Indeed, \u201cAir Bud Returns<\/a>\u201d is about to be the 15th entry in a franchise that, by the time of its release, will be 30 years old. But \u201cAir Bud Returns\u201d is now an independent film, and even though 12 of those movies were released straight to video, it is also aiming to be a theatrical play and a box office hit.<\/p>\n

The original \u201cAir Bud\u201d from 1997<\/a> was released by Disney and made $23.1 million at the box office, which is about $47.4 million when factoring in inflation. But the second film \u2014 \u201cGolden Receiver,\u201d in which Buddy the dog switches from basketball to football \u2014 made just $10.2 million. The subsequent films, which have seen Air Bud play soccer, baseball, and volleyball, and were then eventually spun off into the \u201cAir Buddies\u201d series about golden retriever puppies who talk, have super powers, go to space, and twice save Christmas, were all released straight-to-video.<\/p>\n

\"'A<\/a> \"The<\/a> <\/p>\n

It sounds like the perfect opportunity for a reboot would be to reintroduce a new generation to \u201cAir Bud\u201d through streaming, but \u201cAir Bud Returns\u201d will in fact open in theaters on January 22, 2027. And the filmmakers believe it\u2019s a theatrical movie for the same reason that the first one was 30 years ago. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe kids who watched the original \u2018Air Bud\u2019 were 10 years old, and you\u2019re a parent now. Now it\u2019s the kids and their parents introducing them to \u2018Air Bud,’\u201d director and Air Bud Entertainment CEO Robert Vince told IndieWire as part of a CinemaCon event<\/a> in the Barco Cinema space. \u201cSomebody took you to the theater, your parents, and 1776904817 they\u2019re grandparents. The timing has lined up perfectly from a demographic point of view, and we knew that and we were watching it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vince has heard NBA players say \u201cAir Bud\u201d was an inspiration for them, there was an \u201cSNL\u201d sketch with Sydney Sweeney featuring Air Bud, and John Oliver<\/a> has devoted an insane amount of time talking about the franchise to the point that he originally wanted a part in the new film. Oliver joked that, between the global search for Air Bud and a crowdfunding investment campaign in support of the film, Vince not only had no dog but also had no money. Sounds like an indie filmmaker to us.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt became so loud, we could tell that the timing was right,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Vince is touting \u201cAir Bud Returns\u201d as not another sequel, rather a theatrical re-imagination of the franchise, but it is very much in the \u201clega-sequel\u201d category<\/a> effectively remaking the original. The new film exists in a universe in which not only does the original Air Bud exist, but in which a movie about that dog\u2019s life was made, i.e. the original \u201cAir Bud.\u201d <\/p>\n

In the 12 minutes of footage we saw from the film at CinemaCon<\/a>, the new Buddy walks past a statue of the original Buddy. When that Buddy meets a young boy in a wheelchair who has also lost his parents, they together watch an old VHS tape of the original film and become inspired to recruit Buddy for the school basketball team. It\u2019s even the same Timberwolves team uniform Buddy wears, there\u2019s another grumpy clown trying to get Buddy back, and there is yet another referee who says \u201cthere still ain\u2019t a rule that dogs can\u2019t play basketball.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vince said his lead dog in \u201cAir Bud Returns\u201d is an incredibly well-trained \u201cmovie star\u201d type dog, but it\u2019s \u201cnot as easy to train as you might think\u201d to teach them how to play basketball. The original Air Bud was not trained by a professional, instead it was Kevin DeCicco who first got the dog onto David Letterman\u2019s \u201cStupid Pet Tricks,\u201d and he was more of a \u201cparty dog\u201d who knew how to do these unique tricks you see in the first film.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe had this really innate ability. He was one of a kind. He was a savant,\u201d Vince said. \u201cWe could never replicate that ability with one dog.\u201d <\/p>\n

\"\"\u2018Air Bud Returns\u2019Kailey Schwerman<\/p>\n

What makes all this an indie is that \u201cAir Bud Returns\u201d will not be released by Disney, but is now a Cineverse<\/a> joint, better known as the folks who brought you the \u201cTerrifier\u201d franchise of horror films. \u201cAir Bud Returns\u201d is the first in the company\u2019s foray into family-friendly films after cornering that niche horror market for movies about murderous clowns (\u201cAir Bud Returns\u201d thankfully doesn\u2019t have Art the Clown chasing Buddy in his car).<\/p>\n

Cineverse\u2019s whole thing is that, instead of doing wide marketing with big ad buys, it turned \u201cTerrifier 2\u201d and \u201cTerrifier 3\u201d into hits<\/a> by leveraging its network of other streaming services and podcast channels with very minimal P&A spend and hyper-focused marketing. <\/p>\n

The difference here is that \u201cAir Bud Returns\u201d is a four-quadrant family film that needs to be spread wider, but Cineverse chief motion pictures officer Yolanda Macias told us that \u201cAir Bud\u201d represented IP with a built-in fanbase, and their goal is to identify other family-friendly IP that scratches that same nostalgic itch. Their only goal then is to make the theatrical release into an event, with CinemaCon being the first step on that journey, which also includes Buddy taking a trip to Cannes.<\/p>\n

Cineverse\u2019s journey with \u201cAir Bud Returns\u201d started before production began, with the distributor leading the charge of the search to find the dogs that would portray Buddy in the film. The team received over 5,000 video submissions of people with their golden retrievers before settling on two (the one we met at CinemaCon was named Roscoe). For them, that\u2019s enough of a vote of confidence that there\u2019s an audience here that believes a film like this can succeed at the box office just as much as they can believe a dog can ball.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is the heart of America saying we want Air Bud to return home,\u201d Macias said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How can a franchise that is about to have 15 movies in its catalog and has been Disney…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":412640,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[181049,89536,93,1043,61,60,21024,270],"class_list":{"0":"post-412639","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-air-bud-returns","9":"tag-cineverse","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-film","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-john-oliver","15":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=412639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412639\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/412640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}