Anne Hathaway thinks Hollywood’s rating system is missing an obvious rule: kill a dog on screen, and the movie should automatically get slapped with an R. The Oscar winner made the case in an interview with Complex while promoting her new film, “The End of Oak Street,” which opened in theaters Friday.
Hathaway said she noticed audiences expressing anxiety online about whether Starbuck, the Australian cattle dog belonging to her character’s family in the film, survives its runtime. She traced that fear to a specific cultural touchstone. “I think everybody’s so traumatized by John Wick,” she said, referring to the 2014 action film in which the title character’s dog is killed by antagonists early in the story, a scene widely credited with fueling the franchise’s revenge plot and lingering in viewers’ memories since.
That anxiety, Hathaway argued, has outpaced reality. She questioned aloud which films are actually killing dogs with any regularity, suggesting the fear has become disproportionate to how often the trope actually appears on screen. Her proposed fix cuts against typical ratings logic, which weighs profanity, violence and sexual content, but rarely factors in animal deaths specifically. “Doesn’t matter if anybody curses, doesn’t matter if there’s violence, if a dog dies, R-rated,” she said.
As for Starbuck’s fate in “The End of Oak Street,” Hathaway offered reassurance without confirming outright. She acknowledged the film, directed by J.J. Abrams and co-starring Ewan McGregor, “breaks rules” but suggested killing off the dog isn’t one of them, telling fans not to worry. The story follows a suburban family whose neighborhood is thrown into chaos after an otherworldly event, with the movie currently rated PG-13.
Hathaway’s remarks arrive during an unusually busy stretch of her career. Her 2026 slate also includes “The Devil Wears Prada 2,” “Mother Mary” and Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” the latter of which does include a dog’s death, though notably from old age rather than violence.
