Sad dog movies are the worst, and a new website is aiming to keep nasty surprises at bay.
Sad dog movies are the worst, especially when they come out of the blue without warning (looking at you, John Wick trilogy). But that’s where a new website could help.
Dog O’Day learned of this through the online magazine Mental Floss.
A website called DoesTheDogDie.com keeps track of movies where dogs die onscreen, everything from the predictable classic tearjerkers like Old Yeller or Where the Red Fern Grows, to unexpected titles like the sci-fi action movie Alita: Battle Angel.
Of course, the converse is also true – if you search for something like Where the Heart Is (the Natalie Portman movie where she’s a pregnant teenager who has her baby in Wal-Mart), no dogs die in that film. (Many awful things do happen in the Billie Letts novel of the same name, but no dogs die there, either.)
There are about four thousand movies and over eight hundred TV series included in the site’s database right now, and since it’s a crowdsourced type of thing, those numbers will expand in the future.
Mental Floss reports that DoesTheDogDie.com also covers cats and horses, along with other alarming incidents like kidnappings and plane crashes. So it seems likely that The Fox and the Hound would be included.
While it doesn’t include any canines actually perishing, it does feature a lot of frightening sequences of Todd the fox being hunted, and the veteran hunting dog Chief breaks his leg after getting run over by a train.
While the site is free to use, an optional yearly $12 subscription will take out the ads if those are bothersome.
Will you be using this site in the future? What is your opinion on sad dog movies in general?