Anne Hathaway Calls for Movies With Dog Deaths to Be Rated R

Anne Hathaway has strong feelings about depictions of dog deaths in films. So strong that she believes movies which have such scenes should be rated R, full stop.

“I feel like movies that kill dogs should automatically be rated R,” she told Complex Pop Culture in a social media video posted Wednesday during an interview promoting her new film The End of Oak Street. “It doesn’t matter if anybody curses. It doesn’t matter if there’s violence. If a dog dies, R rated.”

During the interview, the actress told a reporter that she’s been seeing people concerned that the family dog is going to die in The End of Oak Street. She pretty much shut down that possibility, saying, “We break rules in this movie. That might not be one of them. Don’t worry.”

But people’s concerns brought her to consider the origins of these worries. “I’m like, which movies are out there killing dogs? That everybody is so scared that we’re just casually doing it in movies now?” she said. She thinks she has an answer.

“I think everybody is so traumatized by John Wick,” she noted.

In that film, the titular character sets off on a mission of revenge after gangsters kill his puppy.

The End of Oak Street, directed by J.J. Abrams and starring Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, focuses on a family trying to survive after their neighborhood is thrown into chaos by an otherworldly event. In the film, Starbuck, an Australian cattle dog, is part of the family.

“Starbuck is the undisputed star of the film,” Hathaway said in a promotional interview. “You just put a camera on him and you fall in love.”

The film hits theaters August 14th.