John Wick's Puppy Death Scene Was A Major Point Of Contention

I think it's safe to say that nobody — absolutely nobody — enjoys seeing a dog meet its end on screen. Dogs are (in my biased opinion) incredible creatures that humanity barely deserves in the first place, so why would we want to watch them get hurt or even killed in a movie or TV show? It feels like an uncrossable line in many ways. Apparently, the investors behind the first "John Wick" movie felt exactly like this when co-directors David Leitch and Chad Stahelski proposed the movie's big dog death scene.

As you probably know, the first movie in the "John Wick" franchise opens with the titular assassin, played by Keanu Reeves, mourning his late wife Helen (Bridget Moynihan), who arranged for him to receive a sweet beagle puppy after her passing. The puppy, named Daisy, immediately takes a shine to John, going so far as to curl up on his bed at night, and they form an immediate bond ... but when John refuses to sell his car to the petulant crime heir Iosef Tarasov ("Game of Thrones" veteran Alfie Allen), Iosef and his goons break into John's house, kill Daisy, and steal his car.

According to Leitch, who — alongside Stahelski — spoke to Business Insider for the movie's 10th anniversary, they got a lot of pushback about the puppy's death scene. "We were told, 'It's bad luck.' 'It's bad juju.' 'It's 'Old Yeller,' you can't do this!'" Stahelski recalled. "'No one will want to see this on screen; you're going to alienate the audience.' And I'm like, 'We're going to execute people at close range; killing the dog is one thing, but what about the brutal massacre of all these human beings? Are they going to be able to accept that?' They didn't understand that we were making a genre movie. We are genre fans to the core, and we know those hard-boiled moments are what make memorable moments."

If you've seen the puppy scene in "John Wick," you know that it's heartbreaking — personally, I think the choice to let the audience hear sweet little Daisy yelp in pain as she's killed is way too much — but you also don't really see very much of it. As Chad Stahelski put it, he and David Leitch knew that they had to approach this sensitively, so they were very careful about the way the violence was shown.

"Dave and I were very in sync on how we were going to shoot the scene," Stahelski said. "We were going to use a baby lens; John gets hit hard in the head, so it's going to be dream-like; the dog death happens off-camera, and all you are going to see in the aftermath is this trail of the blood making it look like the puppy tried to crawl to him." 

Incredibly, a bunch of people on set thought the idea to kill the dog was so bad that they kept pitching an alternate ending after Leitch and Stahelski filmed the original. "So on the day, Keanu was acting with a stuffed dog. Crying. He's all beat up. He looks awful in his pajamas," Stahelski continued. "Everyone behind the monitors must have thought, 'Okay, this is the worst idea; these first-time directors are done.' For the next couple of weeks it was suggested that we shoot an alternative ending revealing that the puppy actually isn't dead."

So, how did it all get resolved? The movie's star and a major producer defended the decision. According to Stahelski, "But Keanu stood up for us. And Basil [Iwanyk, a producer] stood up to the investors, and eventually, they just felt, 'F*** it, let's see what these guys can do.'"

If you're a dog lover and you haven't watched the "John Wick" movies precisely because of the Daisy scene in the original 2014 movie, I have some good news for you. Throughout the three sequels that followed — 2017's "John Wick: Chapter 2," 2019's "John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum," and 2023's "John Wick: Chapter 4" — dogs are basically treated as sacred, and even when you think one might be hurt, you're gloriously wrong. 

At the end of "John Wick," an injured John staggers into a dog pound and leaves with a pit bull; though the dog is never named on screen, John brings them to the assassins-only hotel The Continental at the start of "John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum" to keep him safe while John escapes from the crime lord council the High Table. (The dog is welcomed kindly and graciously by Charon, the hotel's all-knowing concierge, played by the late, great Lance Reddick.) In that same movie, John teams up with his old friend and another "retired" assassin Sofia Al-Azwar (Halle Berry), who travels with two Belgian Malinois dogs that end up providing one of the franchise's best action sequences as they pick off enemy combatants. When Sofia's old boss Berrada (Jerome Flynn) shoots a dog, it turns out it was wearing a vest; Sofia shoots him in the kneecap in retribution. (When she defends her decision to John, he simply replies, "I get it.")

Finally, in "John Wick: Chapter 4," John is being chased by an assassin named Mr. Nobody (Shamier Anderson) and his dog, another Belgian Malinois — but when John saves the dog from certain death, Mr. Nobody leaves John alone. Dogs are a powerful symbol in the "John Wick" franchise, even if Daisy had to be sacrificed in the first movie ... and it's been awesome to watch a bunch of dogs save the day since that scene.