It stars Will Arnett, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Natasha Lyonne, Jordin Sparks, Gabriel Iglesias, Shaquille O'Neal, Omar Chaparro, and Stanley Tucci.

[4] In the United States and Canada, Show Dogs was released on May 18, 2018, alongside Deadpool 2 and Book Club, and was projected to gross $7–9 million from 3,145 theaters in its opening weekend.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Show Dogs may entertain very young viewers, but for anyone else, it threatens the cinematic equivalent of a rolled-up newspaper on the snout.

[7] Christy Lemire of RogerEbert.com gave the film 0.5 out of four stars and said that from "the barely-there characters to the cheesy visual effects to the flat attempts at knowingly corny laughs, this reeks of the kind of material you'd have the misfortune of discovering in the bargain bin under the merciless fluorescent lights of your local soulless superstore.

"[13] The movie's solution to Max's discomfort with the inspection is not to empower him to escape it somehow; it's to have him learn to check out mentally while he endures it, and to make no outward sign of his humiliation.

The film was criticized for normalizing child grooming based on a plot point that depicts the canine main character being forced to have his genitals fondled by a dog show judge without consent.

"[20] In response to these concerns, the film's co-writer Max Botkin stated that he did not write those scenes and that the original script was "heavily rewritten by 13 other writers", going on to strongly condemn the themes in question.

[21]The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, formerly Morality in Media, still objected to the edited version of the film, writing that it retains many of the controversial genital-touching scenes and thus strongly advising parents and caregivers to avoid taking children to it.