Snoopy’s Big City Adventure Has a Name: Everything We Know About ‘Snoopy Unleashed’

We finally have a name for Apple’s upcoming Snoopy feature film — a project that will mark only the second time in Peanuts history that Charlie Brown and the gang have come to the big screen.

Apple became the custodian of Charles Schulz’s legacy — “the official streaming destination for all things Peanuts” — in a 2020 deal that expanded its previous STEM-focused arrangement to produce Snoopy in Space as one of the first animated shows to launch on the service originally known as Apple TV+.

Since then, it’s breathed new life into the iconic franchise, leading into a series of more character-driven stories with For Auld Lang Syne — the first Charlie Brown holiday special that had been produced in over two decades — and marking another milestone last year with the delightful Snoopy Presents: A Summer Musical, bringing the Peanuts gang back into their first song-filled extravaganza since the 1988 TV adaptation of 1975’s Off-Broadway Snoopy: The Musical stage production.

In the midst of all this, Apple has had another ambitious project in the works. In late 2023, Apple announced that it would be producing a feature film that would “see the Peanuts gang go on an epic adventure to the Big City, learning the true meaning of friendship, while meeting some surprising new friends along the way,” while teasing that Snoopy and Charlie Brown would “face their biggest challenge yet.”

The initiative was heralded by Craig Schulz, son of the legendary Peanuts creator, who said that “Peanuts fans have been clamoring for another feature for years, and this film will bring joy to our millions of fans around the world.” However, it didn’t even have a title back then — at least not one that Apple was ready to share — and little else was known about it beyond that basic plot point and that Apple had tagged director Steve Martino, who also helped 2015’s The Peanuts Movie to lead the project alongside the keepers of the Schulz legacy — Craig and his son Bryan.

While Apple hasn’t published a formal press release, it revealed the whimsical title during this year’s CinemaCon: Snoopy Unleashed.

Around the same time, Apple also quietly updated its Apple TV Press page to add a few details:

Sadly, we don’t yet have a formal release date beyond “Coming Soon,” but the fact that it’s now on Apple’s official lineup raises hopes that it should debut sometime this year — possibly even as soon as the summer.

That hope is bolstered by the fact that, according to Deadline, Snoopy Unleashed is on the roster for the Annecy International Film Festival’s Work in Progress (WIP) lineup, meaning it will effectively be previewed at the festival in June. Still, the nature of WIP entries, which focus on letting filmmakers talk about their creative processes for “works currently in production,” means there’s no guarantee the film is entirely in the can yet.

Ironically, despite Apple TV hosting nearly all things related to the Peanuts legacy, Snoopy Unleashed will become the first feature film on the service. That’s because the one outlier from Apple’s guardianship is the original 2015 The Peanuts Movie, which has bounced around between other streaming services from Disney+ to HBO Max and Amazon Prime due to its more complicated ownership and licensing issues. It’s unclear if Apple will ever pick up the rights to roll this one into Apple TV, but The Peanuts Movie can be purchased in the Apple TV app (nee “iTunes Store”) for those who want access to the complete collection.