A Dog's Purpose

A Dog's Purpose follows a dog who dies and is reborn repeatedly, each time into a different body and a different life. His first and most important life is spent with a boy named Ethan, with whom he forms a deep bond that shapes everything that comes after. In later incarnations he serves other owners in different roles, but a sense of purpose pulls him back toward the person he loved first. The story is told largely from the dog's point of view and spans several decades.

Lasse Hallström directed the film, the seventeenth of the twenty features credited to him, arriving between The Hundred-Foot Journey and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. Josh Gad provides the voice of the dog across his various lives, while K.J. Apa and Britt Robertson play the teenage Ethan and Hannah, and Juliet Rylance, Luke Kirby and John Ortiz appear in supporting roles. The screenplay was written by Audrey Wells, Wallace Wolodarsky and Maya Forbes, and Gavin Polone produced. The film is a Canada-United States co-production with India also credited, and it was made for about 22 million dollars, a modest figure for a release of this kind.

Its worldwide gross of roughly 205 million dollars represents a strong return on that investment, and audiences responded warmly: it holds a 7.3 rating on IMDb from around 86,000 votes and a 7.6 on TMDB, though the film critics' rating stands considerably lower at 4.9 from 147 reviews. The credited cast numbers sixty, with eighty crew members.