For most of pop-culture history, the dog has had a job description: show up, be loyal, get a pat, exit. The faithful companion. The comic relief. The thing the hero rescues in the third act. A good gig, but a supporting one.
Something shifted in 2025. This was the year dogs stopped playing the sidekick and started carrying the story. They led films, narrated horror, lobbied award bodies, and in one case literally walked in off the street and into a starring role. So instead of marching through the year in calendar order, we have arranged these nine moments along the arc that actually defined them, from dogs who held their own next to human stars, to dogs who simply did not need the humans at all. Not a ranking. Ranking good dogs is an absurd exercise. Every animal here is excellent, which is the only category that matters.
First, the scene-stealers who shared the frame
A Great Dane out-acts the room in The Friend
Not every dog can share a frame with Naomi Watts and hold it. Bing the Great Dane did exactly that in The Friend, the April grief comedy-drama in which Watts plays a writer who inherits her late mentor’s dog, Apollo. Bing gives Apollo enough emotional range to carry the film’s quietest scenes, and the real bond underneath shows: Watts welcomed him into her home during the film’s COVID-extended production.
“She never let dog hair or slobber bother her,” Bing’s trainer Bev Klingensmith said during the release. “She had no problem with, you know, kind of just getting up in there, just enjoying the dog, and allowing the bond to happen that way.”
James Gunn’s rescue dog rewrote a superhero
The CGI Krypto in this summer’s Superman was animated, but his soul was real. Director James Gunn adopted a dog named Ozu during production, and bringing home a deeply unsocialized rescue reshaped the character. As Gunn shared on Instagram, Ozu “came from a hoarding situation in a backyard with 60 other dogs” with no human contact. The adjustment was rough: Ozu “immediately came in [and] destroyed our home, our shoes, our furniture,” Gunn wrote, and somehow even ate his laptop. “It took a long time before he would even let us touch him.” Imagining that chaos with superpowers turned out to be the creative spark the film needed.
Then, the dogs who became the main event
Amendoim walked in off the street and into a Netflix lead
If one story captured the whole year, it was Amendoim’s, “Peanut” in Portuguese, the lead dog in Netflix’s Caramelo. Director Diego Freitas told Brazilian outlet Splash that Amendoim “showed up at the production company’s door” as a roughly three-month-old puppy. “It was meant to be,” Freitas said. The film is built around vira-lata caramelo dogs, the scrappy, beloved Brazilian street dog that has become a national symbol, and it cast about 60 of them. All 60 were adopted when production wrapped, most by crew members. The film debuted on Netflix on October 9 and quickly became one of the platform’s most-watched titles worldwide, turning a stray puppy into an international lead actor inside a single year.
A Duck Toller campaigned for Best Actor in Good Boy
Horror has a long, grim history of bad outcomes for dogs. Good Boy, out in October, cheerfully demolished that tradition by making the dog the protagonist and narrator. Indy, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, carries the entire perspective of the film as his owner faces a harrowing illness in a remote house. The performance was precise and expressive enough that Indy went on to lobby the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for Best Actor consideration. The Academy did not respond. The people did.
Folktales let dogs teach teenagers about ego
This Norwegian documentary, out in July, became required viewing for anyone who believes in the animal-human bond. Folktales follows teenagers at the Pasvik Folk High School who surrender their phones to learn survival skills, including the care of 40 sled dogs, over an extended remote stay. Co-director Rachel Grady named the lesson directly: caring for that many animals “is not about you. You have to show up, because this animal is relying on you to feed it, to make sure that it’s healthy, to check its body and make sure its claws are OK … there’s something about that that’s just incredibly healthy for one’s ego.” Her summary of the film’s message: “You have to check some of your self-absorbed selfishness at the door.”
The cultural moments, where dogs simply ran the show
Flow proved great cinema transcends species
Most films get a polite glance from our pets before they return to napping. Flow was different. Latvia’s first Oscar-winning film, an animated, dialogue-free story of a cat, a dog, a capybara, a bird, and a lemur surviving a flooded post-apocalyptic world together, became a phenomenon for animal audiences. Co-writer and producer Matiss Kaza told The New York Times that real animal sounds were used to voice the characters, which may explain the flood of videos showing real pets transfixed by the screen. Apparently a dog will sit through a movie if another dog is genuinely in it.
Sabrina Carpenter’s dogs landed a Dogue spread
The summer’s biggest album rollout came with a canine moment of equal importance: Sabrina Carpenter’s dogs Goodwin and Louie scored a full spread in Dogue, complete with a miniature Mercedes convertible, Elizabethan collars, tiaras, and group shots with American Girl dolls. The behind-the-scenes content alone justified the existence of celebrity dog journalism. May it not be the last we see of them.
Demi Moore’s Chihuahua crashed the Met Gala (from outside)
Dogs cannot attend the Met Gala, a cruel and arbitrary rule. Demi Moore worked around it by photographing herself and her Chihuahua, Pilaf, in coordinated pre-event outfits. Pilaf’s look was more understated than Demi’s, since elaborate stiff collars do not, as a rule, suit a Chihuahua, but the coordination was unmistakable. Pilaf first went international at Cannes during the The Substance press run and has been a fixture since, including her own Dogue moment. She remains the Gala’s most compelling uninvited guest.
Soleil made history at the National Dog Show
The National Dog Show’s televised Best in Show records reach back to 2002, and in all that time a Belgian Sheepdog had never won, until Soleil did, on Thanksgiving 2025. It was the first time the breed took the top prize in Philadelphia, with George, an American Foxhound, taking Reserve Best in Show. Handler Daniel Martin put it best: “Soleil loves the energy, and she feels it. That’s her magic.” Full coat, gleaming, a smile that carries through the screen. By any reasonable measure, the year ended on her.
What the year added up to
Look at the list and the pattern is hard to miss. A street dog led a record-breaking film. A retriever ran for Best Actor. A dialogue-free animal cast won an Oscar and held real dogs spellbound. None of these were pets reacting to a human story; they were the story. That tracks with a bigger cultural shift happening off-screen too, as younger pet owners increasingly treat their dogs as family rather than accessories and the industry follows the money. 2025 did not invent the famous dog. It just stopped asking the dog to wait in the wings.
References
- NPR, “Soleil, a Belgian sheepdog, takes Best in Show at the National Dog Show” (Nov. 27, 2025).
- Netflix, “Caramelo” — official title page.
- The New York Times, coverage of Flow and its use of real animal recordings.
- Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, records on the animated feature and acting categories.
