Trivia / The Secret Life of Pets

• Acting for Two: Steve Coogan not only voices the hairless Sphynx cat, Ozone, but also Reginald, the cat at Duke's old home.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: Louis C.K., Eric Stonestreet, Kevin Hart, Jenny Slate, Ellie Kemper, Lake Bell, Bobby Moynihan, Hannibal Buress, and Albert Brooks.
• Dueling Movies: With Finding Dory, which also has animals in captivity. It's also a direct duel at the box office, coming about four weeks after Dory's premiere.
• Follow the Leader: The film's success led other studios to try to capitalize on the premise of an animated film focusing on pets, such as The Queen's Corgi and DC League Of Superpets.
• International Coproduction: Like all Illumination's films, the animation was made by Illumination Mac Guff studios in France.
  • This also can go to the Latin American Spanish dub, as it was dubbed using voice actors from almost all the Latin American countries with voice acting industries in the region (Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, Peru^note Despite that country doesn't have a notorious voice acting industry compared with other South American countries, and it's mostly reserved for local productions, this started to change by 2017, albeit with direct-to-video films almost exclusively., and the United States in Los Angeles, CA.^note This is somewhat cheating since Eugenio Derbez did the dub voice of Snowball from there, despite being Mexican.) something that was never tried before in Latin America, as other dubbing coproductions typically involved two or three countries at least.
• Kids' Meal Toy: McDonald's released a set of ten plushes in their Happy Meals. These consisted of Max, Duke, Snowball, Mel, Gidget, Norman, Buddy, Chloe, Pops, and Sweetpea.
• The Other Darrin: Due to allegations against him in late 2017, Louis C.K. didn’t return to voice Max in the sequel. It was revealed that Patton Oswalt would take over the role.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Sort of in the Japanese dub: Snowball is voiced by Ryūsei Nakao, a voice actor well known for voicing villainous roles in Anime, like Frieza or Mayuri Kurotsuchi, but in foreign media, he normally tends to dub heroic roles like Darkwing Duck, Buster Bunny, Yakko Warner, and others. Snowball is anything but heroic, and one of the few times he voiced a villain in a foreign dub.
  • Also from the Japanese dub, Miyuki Sawashiro's role as Gidget sounds a little bit off compared with her normal modus operandi of voicing The Cutie or the Action Girl, as she basically sounds like Cammy White after smoking a whole cigarette pack, albeit mostly when she is screaming. Similarly, Yūki Kaji (Norman), Mamoru Miyano (Tiberius), and Banjo Ginga (Pops) sound very different compared with their normal modus operandi here.^note  In Kaji's case, he speaks with the same voice he used as Koichi Hirose, albeit digitally distorted to make him sound like a guinea pig, in Miyano's case, he speaks with a deeper, slurred voice, and in Ginga's case, he speaks with an unspecified European accent.
  • In the Latin American dub, Eugenio Derbez as Snowball is also unusual, as he is usually typecasted with heroic roles or roles related to comedy.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A video found on the movie's Facebook page showed a variant of the Illumination Entertainment logo where a Minion is seen teasing a Beagle puppy with a ball, only to get caught in the act by a group of dogs and chased off-stage. Said variant did not make it into the final film and was instead replaced by this.
  • Before Brian Lynch came onboard with the film, Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio were already working on it as a “straight thriller”, comparing it to Rear Window, with the dog seeing the murder and “basically, and he can’t express what happened to his owner, so he and his pet friends have to go do something about it.” Lynch recalled watching early tests in the screening room and describing the movie as pretty dark. When he became more involved to the project however, the film was changed to a more streamlined buddy comedy.
  • In the concept art made by Éric Guillon, there're several different designs for the characters; an example is Max being a yellow Fox Terrier and his owner Katie having ginger hair.
  • Before Lee Unkrich directed Toy Story 3, he came up with the idea for a untitled film that "had similar elements with The Secret Life of Pets".

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