Box Office Bomb: Budget: $125–150 million. Box office: $111.1 million. Despite performing slightly above expectations on opening weekend—especially in the face of mixed critical reviews—this film lost about $50–100 million at the box office thanks to its rather high budget,note as a result of the CGI, which was seen by critics as the weakest aspect of the film strong competition from Sonic the Hedgehog and later The Invisible Man and Onward,note although Onward also underperformed at the box office in comparison to other Pixar films, especially after suffering a huge drop in its second weekend and the massive impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on the cinema industry. After the pandemic ramped up in the United States, the film was digitally released early on the night of March 27, 2020.
Since the movie was already filmed when Disney acquired 20th Century Fox, the larger company had to honor their new subsidiary's release schedule and release it theatrically. That said, while the company couldn't rebrand the film as a Disney picture, they did make an effort to promote the film on some of its own platforms and social media channels as well as those of 20th Century; in countries where 20th Century does not have an exclusive distribution deal with another network* such as the US, where the film made its cable premiere on HBO, the film was later added to Disney+.
Likewise, Chris Sanders left Disney in 2007 under somewhat acrimonious circumstances (with John Lasseter playing a significant role in that) and joined DreamWorks Animation. He later joined 20th Century Fox in the mid-2010s to work on this film. Disney's purchase of the studio temporarily brought him back under their employ (outside of Sanders's voice acting as Stitch in crossover projects, which are handled by Disney Character Voices), but even after Lasseter's departure from the studio, Sanders was by no means ever going to stay, which was later confirmed in 2023 when it was revealed that he went back to DreamWorks to do a new animated film. (That being said, it was reported that same year that Sanders did negotiate with Walt Disney Pictures to reprise his voice role as Stitch again for the upcoming live-action remake of his Lilo & Stitch.)
Dueling Works: With the Disney+ film Togo, another period piece survival story focused on an unconventional sled dog and his grizzled owner played by a well-known older actor. The two films were greenlit as competitors but wound up under the same corporate umbrella following Disney's purchase of Fox. To a lesser extent, the film is also a competitor with The Great Alaskan Race, another film based on the same true-life event as Togo, but that film fizzled out with terrible reviews and a <$1 million box office performance. Ultimately, Togo won with superior reviews (particularly for the real animal actors), while Call of the Wild earned mixed reviews, heavy criticism at directed at its CG animals, and a poor showing at the box office (see Box Office Bomb above).
Release Date Change: The film was originally going to be released on December 25, 2019, but it was eventually pushed back to February 21, 2020, following the acquisition of 20th Century Fox by Disney, like many other Fox movies produced right before or during the merger. Disney decided so in order to clear the way to both Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker and Spies in Disguise.
What Could Have Been: Mercedes, Charlie, and Hal's sled dogs were originally supposed to die by falling into the frozen river as they did in the book, with just Hal being Spared by the Adaptation only to die in the climax anyway. Perhaps due to Mercedes and Charlie's adaptational niceness plus the notion of a pack of dogs drowning being too upsetting to kids, this was changed so that the sled dogs crossed the river but escaped from Hal later on, prompting Mercedes and Charlie to abandon him as well.
Other Trivia:
This film is Chris Sanders' first solo and live-action directorial effort, as all his previous directed feature-length films have been fully animated films done with another director (Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon (2010) with Dean DeBlois, and The Croods with Kirk DeMicco). Thanks to Disney's buyout of Fox, it also marked his return to Disney in a non-voice-acting role since he departed in 2007, although this was only for this film, as Sanders has returned to DreamWorks to work on a new unannounced project there.
Following the removal of the "Fox" brand in January 2020, this was the first film under the newly-renamed "20th Century Studios". This gives it something in common with the 1935 film version, which was one of the last movies released by the original Twentieth Century Pictures before it merged with Fox Films to become Twentieth Century Fox.
