Anne Hathaway Says Films Where Dogs Die Should Be Rated R

Anne Hathaway believes that films that include storylines about dogs dying should come with an R rating.

In a recent interview with Complex, the Oscar winner admitted she’d seen speculation about the fate of the dog, Starbuck, in The End of Oak Street. “I feel like movies that kill dogs should automatically be rated R. Doesn’t matter if anybody curses, it doesn’t matter if there’s violence, if a dog dies, R-rated,” she said.

“Somebody was like, ‘Can you just let the audiences know that, like, it’s all gonna be OK?’ We break rules in this movie, that might not be one of them. Don’t worry,” she continued. “I think everybody’s so traumatized by John Wick, because I’ve been seeing those [comments about The End of Oak Street] too, like, ‘They better not kill the dog.’

She added, “I’m like, which movies are out there killing dogs that everybody’s scared that we’re just casually doing it in movies now?”

The End of Oak Street stars Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as parents whose family is suddenly shifted to a location inhabited by dinosaurs. The Hollywood Reporter‘s chief film critic David Rooney commended her performance in his review, writing, “Hathaway, on the other hand, is the essential glue holding the film together. Denise — a name that kept making me wish this were an all-out schlocky B-movie with Denise Richards — is basically an Anne Tyler character in a Michael Crichton novel. She’s a woman looking around now that her kids are growing up and acknowledging her lack of fulfillment, feelings expressed in a novel she’s secretly been writing, in which the protagonist keeps a suitcase packed in the hope she might one day run away from her suffocating life as a wife and mother.”

The new film adds to Hathaway’s jam-packed year, as she’s already starred in The Odyssey, Devil Wears Prada 2 and Mother Mary. She has another film still on her schedule for 2026, that of an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s Verity, due in October.

“When I got my schedule for this year from all the wonderful film studios that I’ve worked with, I saw it and I kind of thought I was being punked,” Hathaway told THR at The End of Oak Street premiere. “But then they showed me that no, no, no, all these [release] dates were going to hold and I just said as long as audiences don’t get sick of my face — which I wouldn’t blame them, I would not blame them if they did — let’s go.”