Brad Pitt's New Movie Just Hit 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. I Went In Ready to Roll My Eyes at a Dog Movie, and Odin Wrecked Me Anyway

Here's where I'm starting from, because I think it matters for anything I say after this: a David Ayer movie about a Special Forces vet and his retired combat dog surviving a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness sounded, on paper, exactly like the kind of movie a studio builds in a marketing meeting to make grown men cry on a Friday night. I've seen that movie a dozen times under a dozen different titles. Rugged guy, loyal animal, a string section that swells right on cue. So when Heart of the Beast opened its review embargo Tuesday sitting at a flawless 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, I did what I always do with a suspiciously perfect number this early: I assumed it was sixteen critics who got invited to a friendly first screening, and that the real number would show up once the sample size grew up a little. It did grow up. And where it landed is more interesting than either the 100% or my own skepticism gave it credit for.

What Heart of the Beast is actually about

Strip away the marketing and the setup is almost stubbornly simple. Pitt plays James Belmont, a retired Special Forces officer flying a small seaplane through the Alaskan interior with Odin, his old combat dog, when the plane goes down and strands them both deep in the backcountry with no radio, no rescue window anyone's counting on, and a body of country that would kill you just as fast whether or not anything was hunting you. J.K. Simmons and Anna Lambe fill out the cast in smaller roles, but for most of its 101-minute runtime this is a two-hander between one man and one dog, which is either the bravest structural choice in a $50 million studio movie this year or the riskiest, depending on how much you trust a screenwriter's first produced script to carry that kind of weight. Cameron Alexander wrote it — his first produced screenplay, after the script spent years on Hollywood's Black List of best unproduced work — and Ayer directs from it with the Alaska wilderness itself doing a lot of the storytelling that dialogue usually handles.

The reunion angle is the part I keep coming back to. Ayer and Pitt made Fury together in 2014, a genuinely great World War II tank movie that still holds up, and this is the first time they've worked together since — twelve years, during which Ayer went and made Suicide Squad, Bright, The Beekeeper and A Working Man, and Pitt became, of all things, a bona fide box office phenomenon in a Formula 1 racing movie. Coming off F1: The Movie, which crossed $629 million worldwide and became the highest-grossing film of Pitt's entire career, the obvious move would've been another big swing at that scale. Instead he made a two-character survival film with a dog, in Alaska, with a first-time screenwriter. That's not a small thing to notice about where a 62-year-old A-lister chooses to spend his post-hit momentum, and it's a big part of why I went in more curious than I expected to be.

The 92%, and the honest asterisk sitting next to it

Let's actually walk through how this number moved, because the coverage this week has been genuinely confusing if you only caught one headline. Tuesday, when the embargo lifted, Heart of the Beast was sitting at a perfect 100% on its first 16 reviews. By Wednesday, outlets were reporting 94% to 96%, with several framing it as a new career-best Rotten Tomatoes record for Ayer, edging past End of Watch's 85%. By Thursday — today, the day before wide release — the tally had grown to 37 reviews and landed at 92%, which is still the best-reviewed film of Ayer's career and the best-reviewed film Pitt has ever led, but it's a meaningfully different number than the "record-setting" headlines from 48 hours earlier were built on. None of those earlier headlines were wrong, exactly. They were just describing a smaller, friendlier sample that got less friendly as more critics weighed in, which is a pattern worth knowing about any movie's Tomatometer in its first 72 hours, not just this one.

What's underneath the 92% is more useful than the number itself. The Associated Press's Lindsey Bahr counted it "fresh" but flagged it as predictable and occasionally leaning into what she called straight-up propaganda, while still finding it an effectively thrilling ride. The Daily Beast's Nick Schager landed somewhere similar — he won't put it next to Jack London, but he thinks it'll have audiences reaching for tissues by the end. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw praised the man-and-dog chemistry while dinging the film for leaning too hard into sentimentality, calling it, in his words, a bit cheesy. None of those are pans. They're all "fresh" reviews with real hesitations attached, which tracks with the two numbers that tell you more than the Tomatometer does: a 6.9 average critic rating and a 69 on Metacritic. That's not a movie critics are rallying around as a masterpiece. It's a movie a lot of people liked, respected the craft of, and walked out of with one specific reservation — that it's working you over emotionally and it knows it.

Odin is the reason this works — and the reason I almost didn't trust it

Here's the detail that actually got me, and it's not in most of the trailers: Odin isn't just "a dog." As written and as shown on screen, he's a veteran in the fullest sense the film can make literal — his muzzle is scarred, several of his teeth have been replaced with titanium after combat injuries, and he's missing his front-right leg, wearing a prosthetic for the entire runtime. That's a specific, deliberate choice, and it's doing the same job the film is trying to do with Belmont: making age, injury and trauma visible on a body instead of just implying it through a performance. It's a smart piece of design, and it's also, if I'm being honest, exactly the kind of detail that made me suspicious going in. A three-legged war dog is an efficient way to generate sympathy before a single line of dialogue gets spoken, and efficient sympathy is the thing I'm always the most wary of in a movie that already knows it wants you crying by the end.

So I want to be straight about where I landed on that, because a few critics raised the same flag and I think it's worth taking seriously rather than waving off. The argument goes: killing or endangering a dog on screen is close to an emotional cheat code, and a film built entirely around that device deserves a little skepticism about whether the tears it earns are actually earned. I went in ready to agree with that critique. I came out mostly not agreeing with it, for one specific reason — the film doesn't lean on Odin's condition as a twist or a reveal, it just treats it as who he already is when the story starts, the same way you'd describe a veteran's limp without making it the whole point of the scene. That's a smaller, more disciplined choice than the premise suggests, and it's the difference between a movie using a dog's suffering for a cheap gut-punch and a movie building an actual character who happens to be a dog. Uber, the animal actor playing Odin, does more with body language alone than a lot of human performances manage with a full script, and IGN's review put it almost as bluntly as I'd put it myself: the lead actor in this movie has rugged good looks, does his own stunts, and delivers a genuinely moving, understated performance — and yes, they meant the dog, not Pitt, even though that description works for both of them.

How it stacks up against every man-and-his-dog movie I could think of

Heart of the Beast obviously isn't inventing this genre — Hollywood has been putting a rugged man next to a loyal dog in the wilderness since long before Rin Tin Tin, and Deep Focus Review's comparison to Jack London's "Call of the Wild" territory is exactly right. So instead of reviewing it in a vacuum, I pulled the three most direct modern comparisons — one theatrical hit, one theatrical flop, one that split critics right down the middle — and built the table nobody else has bothered to make, including my own completely subjective "tears index," which is exactly what it sounds like.

What the table actually shows, once you sit with it: the two worse-reviewed movies on this list are also the two where the dog was either fully computer-generated (Call of the Wild) or more of a comedic device than an emotional co-lead (Dog, which is genuinely funny but wears its sentiment more lightly). Heart of the Beast is the only one of the three treating the dog's physical and psychological damage as seriously as the human character's, and it's also the only one where a critic used the word "propaganda" in a review that was still positive. I don't think that's a coincidence. Committing fully to an emotionally heavy premise gets you a higher score and a more polarized "is this manipulative" conversation, in roughly equal measure. That trade-off is, in my opinion, exactly the right one for a studio to make with a movie like this.

Can Pitt's smallest movie in years survive the most crowded weekend of the fall?

Great reviews don't automatically translate into great box office, and Paramount knows it's picked one of the worst possible weekends to find out. Heart of the Beast opens Friday directly against Avengers: Endgame – Encore's rerelease push, Resident Evil's second weekend still riding its own 92% Rotten Tomatoes score, the animated Forgotten Island opening to a reported perfect 100%, and A24's Primetime, which is sitting at 90%. That's five movies critics actually like, all fighting for the same Friday night, which almost never happens outside of a holiday frame. Tracking has Heart of the Beast opening somewhere in the high teens domestically, which would put it a shade above Dog's $14.1 million launch back in 2022 — a reasonable comparison, since Dog is the closest recent film in both premise and PG-13 rating, even though Heart of the Beast is reportedly working with a budget roughly five times the size of Dog's $15 million.

The honest read on that number: it's fine, not spectacular, and it's going to need real legs from word of mouth rather than a big opening to look like a win. Pitt's F1 didn't open huge either by modern blockbuster standards — it built to $629 million through months of strong holds, not a monster first weekend — so there's a version of this where Heart of the Beast follows a similar shape on a much smaller scale: a quiet Friday, a strong Cinemascore, and a slow climb as people who don't go opening weekend for a survival drama start showing up over the following month. There's also a version where a crowded marketplace just eats the smallest, least franchise-branded movie in the lineup alive, and Paramount is looking at a write-down instead of a slow-burn hit. I genuinely don't know which of those happens yet, and I'd be lying if I told you I did. What I do know is Pitt isn't slowing down either way — he's back in December as Cliff Booth in The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, so even a soft weekend here isn't going to be the headline about his year.