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Superman director James Gunn didn't just borrow the look of Krypto from his own dog - he borrowed his destructive behavior too
Krypto is an absolute menace throughout Superman, but that is only because James Gunn's adopted dog was just as destructive.

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Superman is a movie that is packed full of characters, but none of them are quite as memorable as Krypto. As the first live-action version of Superman’s dog we’ve seen, this Krypto is an absolute menace to everyone around him. It has been known for a while that Krypto is based on director James Gunn’s own dog, but he’s shared exactly how much of his worst behavior came from real life.
During an appearance on Late Night with Seth Meyers, James Gunn explained how the real Kyrpto, Ozu, came into his life. “I adopted a dog named Ozu,” the Superman director said. “Yeah. He went to… he was raised in a woman’s backyard. She had a hoarding situation. There were like 60 dogs sleeping on top of each other. He was about a year old. Never knew human contact, but he looked hilarious and he had this one ear that stood up and I brought him home. And my wife was like, ‘Why do we have another dog?’ And I said, ‘No, he’s going to be great.’”
However, adopting a pet from those kinds of conditions isn’t exactly easy. They often come with very specific needs and have very challenging behavior, which also made it into the movie. “He’s… he’s scared of me. He wouldn’t let me touch him, and then he proceeded to destroy my house. Like, he chewed up all my shoes. He chewed up my new $10,000 laptop computer. He destroyed all our furniture.”
So far, it is very easy to tell where James Gunn got inspired by Krypto; these are all behaviors that Superman’s dog displays in the film, but there is one specific – and very destructive behavior – that Ozu had that we see Krypto do. “Every time I would walk around the house, I walk around the house barefoot on the phone, and he would start biting my feet, like, really hard. Like, I didn’t know if he was playing or he hated me or what. And I would, like, have to get up, like, on the counter because I’m on the phone. I can’t scream. So I’d have to get up on the counter to be like – the kitchen counter – to be like, you know, and I’m talking to, like David Zaslav from Warner Brothers.”
That specific conversation ended up sparking the inclusion of Krypto in Superman. “And I’m, like, trying not to scream, then all of a sudden, I see him, like, jumping into the air. And then at a certain point, I was like, ‘I’m glad he doesn’t have superpowers.’ And then I was like, oh, hey. Then something clicked. Yeah. That was how the whole thing started with trying to bring the magic of comic books and the crazy world of DC into a movie.”
So if James Gunn had adopted a less destructive dog, we might never have gotten to see Krypto terrorize Superman for two hours on the big screen.
James Gunn's Superman movie is out now - and we have a lot to say about it. You can also read about Superman's S-Shield through the ages, how Superman and Clark Kent keep their secret identity secret, our recs for best Superman comics, and how to watch all his TV series and movies in order.
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