Disney+ launched with a pair of original movies in Lady and the Tramp and Noelle and we don't have too much longer to wait for the new streaming service's next outing. The first trailer for Togo, a story of a boy and his dog...and also a blizzard and a race to save lives, will be here before December is out, and the first trailer for the film just dropped. Check it out.
Togo is the story of a dog and his owner, Leonhard Seppala, who who traveled hundreds of miles through Alaskan wilderness to help bring diphtheria medication to the town of Nome, where an outbreak had occurred. The new movie stars Willem Dafoe as the Seppala. However, the name of the movie is the name of the dog, and based on the trailer, he does look like the star of the show.
We see the little dog both as an adorable pup and as a 12-year-old lead of a sled team, so the movie looks like it will deal with much more that the Serum Run, and will tell the whole story of the life of this amazing dog.
It's hard to guess what we're going to get with Togo. This is the only the third original movie we will have seen from Disney+, and so we haven't yet got a feel for what the goal or focus will be from Disney with these movies.
Having said that, Togo looks like a combination of an emotional man and animal relationship story, and an exciting, fighting-against-the-odds sports movie (granted, with higher than usual stakes). These are two genres Disney has a lot of experience, and success with, and so Togo may have quite a bit going for it.
And it's got Willem Dafoe in the lead, and you can almost never go wrong with him. For some portion of the film, potentially a lot of it, he will likely be the only human on screen so he'll be doing a lot of this movie's heavy lifting.
While Lady and the Tramp and Noelle weren't terrible movies, they also weren't the home runs that Disney probably wanted them to be. Disney+ doesn't need massive hits like we expect from them on the big screen necessarily. However, some solid movies that get generally positive reactions will go a long way to making Disney+ all the more the "must have" streaming app for anybody who hasn't already signed up for three years.
The only curious thing about Togo is its release date. The movie will come out on December 20, the same day as Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. While it's not clear if you can bury a streaming movie with a theatrical one, it feels like Togo might not get a lot of eyeballs during its first weekend, as a lot of people will be heading out to the theater. Either that, or Disney is setting up its own counter programming option for those less interested in the galaxy, far, far away.
