Strays follows Reggie, an overly peppy Border Terrier who loves his owner Doug, even though he’s a beer-guzzling, abusive, heartless lowlife who wants nothing to do with the precious little pooch. When Reggie is abandoned in the city streets, he teams up with a pack of stray dogs to get revenge on Doug… by biting his penis off.
Strays features an impressive cast, and it’s headlined by two names that are regarded as comedy royalty: Will Ferrell and Academy Award Winner Jamie Foxx. Ferrell rose to fame on the big screen with hit comedies such as Elf, the Anchorman films, Old School, and Step Brothers, and he recently shared the screen with Ryan Reynolds in the musical Christmas comedy film Spirited. Strays isn’t the only major movie that Ferrell will be in this summer as he is also part of the star-studded cast of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. Ferrell will lend his voice to Reggie, the main dog at the center of the film.
After getting his start on In Living Color, Jamie Foxx has become one of the biggest and most talented names in Hollywood and has starred in films across all genres including Ray, Collateral, Django Unchained, Baby Driver, the Horrible Bosses films, Dreamgirls, and he played the supervillain Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man: No Way Home. This summer he’ll also be starring in the sci-fi comedy They Cloned Tyrone. In Strays, Foxx will voice Bug, a Boston Terrier who takes Reggie under his wing.
Other members of the main cast of Strays include Will Forte (The Last Man on Earth) who will be playing Doug, one of the few human roles, Randall Park (WandaVision) as Hunter, an anxious Great Dane who wears a cone, and Isla Fisher (Wedding Crashers) as Maggie, an Australian Shepard.
Universal has staked out a prime summer release date for Strays, as it’ll be hitting theaters on June 9, 2023. The film will be opening against Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, the seventh entry in Paramount’s highly successful franchise.
Typically, when a major studio slots a comedy for the summer it means they’re confident in the film and that seems to be the case with Universal and Strays. Director Josh Greenbaum spoke of the film’s test screenings in a recent interview with Collider’s own Steve Weintraub.
The official trailer for Strays was released by Universal Pictures on February 8, 2023. Whilst namedropping hit comedies like 21 Jump Street and Ted, the very R-Rated trailer is full of the ragtag group of dogs dropping f-bombs, drinking alcohol, humping garden gnomes, and ingesting mushrooms. There is also a sock puppet involved because you can never go wrong with sock puppets.
