The Road Warrior Rule
What the hell, I haven’t explained the most important rule of all!!!! Killing dogs in movies is bad, as any studio executive knows. Some filmmakers continue to do it to prove how out of ideas, I mean, how rebellious they are. Yay.
The rule is simple. You can kill a dog. Dogs die in real life. I pretend for the sake of this sentence to accept it. But if the dog is killed, the one responsible must die, as with The Road Warrior in a truly horrific fashion. The Road Warrior, possible one of the best ten narrative films of all time, adds to the poignancy when the dog actually saves Max’s life. All movies should be like this, even Mad Max: Fury Road. Which did not have a dog in it. Sorry. It’s always just going to be okay.
Films that do not follow this rule die in a perfectly acceptable fashion, slowly from basic cable to indefinite obscurity and goodbye. Films that don’t, like John Wick and even The Lobster, are awesome and still live on a farm with all the other great films.