Air Bud is dead. Long live Air Bud!
The first footage from Air Bud Returns was screened at CinemaCon on Tuesday, revealing that this movie – the 15th entry in the long-running franchise – is a series reboot set within the continuity of the earlier films.
The footage reveals that the canonical golden retriever Buddy of the original Air Bud films is dead, as acknowledged by a memorial statue of him with a basketball that’s been erected in the town of Fernfield.
The canine protagonist of Air Bud Returns is a stray golden retriever who lives in Fernfield. Jacob Morgan (Aydin Artis) – an adolescent boy with a physical disability that requires him to use a wheelchair – comes to take care of this stray, whom he calls Buddy.
Jacob is the son of one of the kids from the team depicted in the original Air Bud movies. Jacob has moved to his father’s hometown of Fernfield after his dad died. Jacob is also the grandson of a former pro basketball player named Jake Morgan (Edwin Lee Gibson), who becomes part of the staff of Jacob’s school basketball team, the Fernfield Timberwolves.
Jacob watches old videotapes of the original Air Bud and his dad’s team with his new dog, who is inspired to become a basketball player like his namesake. For the franchise’s producer and Air Bud Returns writer-director Robert Vince, acknowledging the death of the canonical Buddy “makes total sense” for the story he’s telling here.
“I think that now, more story-wise, I’m always wanting to ground our stories in reality, right? I know it’s not reality, but grounded in reality. So that has a mythical kind of magical whimsicalness to it, but not fairyland,” Vince told me in a chat backstage. “For me, families want to have something grounded in reality. And that’s super important to our storytelling and how we handle this. We don’t take ourselves seriously, but we take the movie seriously in some ways. We don’t try to dumb it down. We try to make it something they can learn from it.”
“I have grandkids, I got five of them now, and my grandkids come over, and they look at our golden retriever, they go, ‘How long is Brody going to live?’ I said, ‘He’ll have a great life.’ But some day, that dog’s going to die. So if I lied to them and said, ‘Oh, this dog’s here forever.’ So that’s just my point of view. And I hope the audience appreciates the honesty that we try to put in our movies.”
One can only imagine how Air Bud enthusiast John Oliver will react to the revelation that the OG Air Bud is dead. Not that the Last Week Tonight host’s episode-long ribbing of the Air Bud franchise and the casting search for a new dog to play the title role bothers Vince much.
“I actually find John Oliver’s humor about Air Bud kind of fun. Yeah, he’s poking fun at us and all that kind of stuff,” Vince said. “So he made fun of us for, ‘Oh, they don’t have a dog?’ Well, no, what we did was we found the best dog out there, and using the best tools possible, which is social media, and a dog playing basketball is not easy to find. And I didn’t want to use CGI. I wanted it to be real. And believe me, it’s not easy to do. The original Air Bud was a one of a kind.”
Vince added, “My point is, I think humor in a tasteful manner is great, and even poking fun at you is good. So John Oliver, I have no trouble with at all.”
Air Bud Returns opens in theaters on January 22, 2027.
Air Bud is dead. Long live Air Bud!
The first footage from Air Bud Returns was screened at CinemaCon on Tuesday, revealing that this movie – the 15th entry in the long-running franchise – is a series reboot set within the continuity of the earlier films.
The footage reveals that the canonical golden retriever Buddy of the original Air Bud films is dead, as acknowledged by a memorial statue of him with a basketball that’s been erected in the town of Fernfield.
The canine protagonist of Air Bud Returns is a stray golden retriever who lives in Fernfield. Jacob Morgan (Aydin Artis) – an adolescent boy with a physical disability that requires him to use a wheelchair – comes to take care of this stray, whom he calls Buddy.
Jacob is the son of one of the kids from the team depicted in the original Air Bud movies. Jacob has moved to his father’s hometown of Fernfield after his dad died. Jacob is also the grandson of a former pro basketball player named Jake Morgan (Edwin Lee Gibson), who becomes part of the staff of Jacob’s school basketball team, the Fernfield Timberwolves.
Jacob watches old videotapes of the original Air Bud and his dad’s team with his new dog, who is inspired to become a basketball player like his namesake. For the franchise’s producer and Air Bud Returns writer-director Robert Vince, acknowledging the death of the canonical Buddy “makes total sense” for the story he’s telling here.
“I think that now, more story-wise, I’m always wanting to ground our stories in reality, right? I know it’s not reality, but grounded in reality. So that has a mythical kind of magical whimsicalness to it, but not fairyland,” Vince told me in a chat backstage. “For me, families want to have something grounded in reality. And that’s super important to our storytelling and how we handle this. We don’t take ourselves seriously, but we take the movie seriously in some ways. We don’t try to dumb it down. We try to make it something they can learn from it.”
“I have grandkids, I got five of them now, and my grandkids come over, and they look at our golden retriever, they go, ‘How long is Brody going to live?’ I said, ‘He’ll have a great life.’ But some day, that dog’s going to die. So if I lied to them and said, ‘Oh, this dog’s here forever.’ So that’s just my point of view. And I hope the audience appreciates the honesty that we try to put in our movies.”
One can only imagine how Air Bud enthusiast John Oliver will react to the revelation that the OG Air Bud is dead. Not that the Last Week Tonight host’s episode-long ribbing of the Air Bud franchise and the casting search for a new dog to play the title role bothers Vince much.
“I actually find John Oliver’s humor about Air Bud kind of fun. Yeah, he’s poking fun at us and all that kind of stuff,” Vince said. “So he made fun of us for, ‘Oh, they don’t have a dog?’ Well, no, what we did was we found the best dog out there, and using the best tools possible, which is social media, and a dog playing basketball is not easy to find. And I didn’t want to use CGI. I wanted it to be real. And believe me, it’s not easy to do. The original Air Bud was a one of a kind.”
Vince added, “My point is, I think humor in a tasteful manner is great, and even poking fun at you is good. So John Oliver, I have no trouble with at all.”
Air Bud Returns opens in theaters on January 22, 2027.