Anne Hathaway has a new rule for the movies, if a dog dies, the film should receive an automatic R rating.
The Oscar winner offered the idea during a lighthearted interview with Complex Pop while promoting her new science-fiction adventure, The End of Oak Street.
The question came up because Hathaway’s latest movie places a suburban family, its neighborhood and its dog Starbuck in a world filled with dinosaurs. Viewers who had seen the trailers were apparently less worried about the human characters than the canine member of the Platt family.
Hathaway stopped short of directly spelling out Starbuck’s fate, but she offered reassurance. She said the movie breaks plenty of rules, but suggested that killing the dog “might not be one of them,” adding, “Don’t worry.”
Hathaway Says a Dog Death Overrides Language and Violence
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“I feel like movies that kill dogs should automatically be rated R,” Hathaway told Complex Pop. She made clear that, under her proposed rule, the rest of a movie’s content would not matter. “Doesn’t matter if anybody curses, doesn’t matter if there’s violence, if a dog dies, R-rated,” she said.
The comment was part of a playful press-tour exchange about one particular movie dog. Under the MPA’s ratings guide, an R-rated movie contains adult material and viewers under 17 are not permitted to attend without a parent or adult guardian.
Hathaway said she had noticed viewers repeatedly worrying that Starbuck might not survive The End of Oak Street. “Somebody was like, can you just let the audiences know that, like, it’s all gonna be OK?” she recalled. Hathaway answered without giving an explicit plot breakdown: “We break rules in this movie, that might not be one of them. Don’t worry.”
She Blames Some of the Anxiety on ‘John Wick’
Hathaway also had a theory about why audiences now become nervous whenever a beloved dog appears to be in danger onscreen. “I think everybody’s so traumatized by John Wick,” she said. The 2014 action movie famously uses the killing of John Wick’s puppy as the event that sends Keanu Reeves’ retired assassin on his violent path of revenge.
Hathaway said she had seen viewers responding to the Oak Street marketing with variations of the same warning: “They better not kill the dog.” That reaction left her wondering how audiences had become conditioned to expect the worst. “Which movies are out there killing dogs that everybody’s scared that we’re just casually doing it in movies now?” she asked.
As Entertainment Weekly noted, there is an amusing wrinkle to Hathaway’s new rule. Another of her 2026 movies, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, includes the death of Odysseus’ elderly dog Argos. Unlike the violent death that launches John Wick, Argos dies of old age after recognizing his returning owner.
Starbuck Joins the Platt Family’s Fight for Survival
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The End of Oak Street follows the Platt family after a mysterious cosmic event tears their street out of suburbia and transports the neighborhood somewhere unknown. Hathaway plays Denise Platt opposite Ewan McGregor as her husband, Greg, with Maisy Stella and Christian Convery playing their children, Audrey and Brian.
The family soon discovers that their new surroundings are populated by dinosaurs, turning their ordinary suburban street into a fight for survival. Starbuck is pulled into the same crisis, giving audiences another member of the family to worry about. A promotional Reel from Warner Bros. even places “Starbuck” alongside “Anne Hathaway” and “Dinosaurs” on its “Summer Blockbuster Checklist.”
Written and directed by It Follows filmmaker David Robert Mitchell, The End of Oak Street is actually rated PG-13. According to the Motion Picture Association’s FilmRatings database, the movie received its PG-13 rating for “some strong violent content, bloody images, some strong language and suggestive material.” Warner Bros. released The End of Oak Street in theaters and IMAX on Aug. 14.