‘The End of Oak Street’ Is the Surprise Sci-Fi Hit of the Summer: Dinosaurs Invade Suburbia

There is a new movie in theaters that everyone is calling the surprise of the summer, and it is exactly as weird and wonderful as the buzz suggests. The End of Oak Street — the dinosaur-apocalypse thriller from It Follows director David Robert Mitchell — is the kind of big, strange, Spielbergian swing that studios rarely take anymore. It stars Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, it is set almost entirely on one suburban street, and yes, there are dinosaurs. Lots of them.

What Is The End of Oak Street?

The setup is gloriously simple: one night, a mysterious cosmic event rips the entire neighborhood of Oak Street out of suburbia and drops it somewhere unknown. The Platt family — Denise (Anne Hathaway), Greg (Ewan McGregor), and their kids — wake up to find their cul-de-sac is now surrounded by alien wilderness, prehistoric predators, and no way home. The tagline says it best: “Where goes the neighborhood.”

Mitchell, who built his name on the brilliantly unsettling It Follows, brings a similar sense of dread and mystery to a much bigger canvas. The film runs a tight 99 minutes, which is practically unheard of for a summer event movie, and it keeps its sci-fi strangeness front and center instead of burying it under spectacle.

Hathaway plays Denise Platt, the mom trying to hold her family together while the world falls apart around them, and McGregor is Greg, her husband, in a role that leans into his gift for playing ordinary men in extraordinary situations. The young cast includes Christian Convery (Sweet Tooth) and Maisy Stella, with support from P.J. Byrne and the rest of the neighbors, including one canine scene-stealer we will get to in a minute.

The Reviews Are Raving — Time Says It Is the Best Dinosaur Movie Since Jurassic Park

The critics have been unusually united on this one. Time magazine called it the best dinosaur movie since Jurassic Park. The New York Times dubbed it “cul-de-sac dino attack.” Pajiba says it is “the best kind of summer film,” and The Bulwark went further, calling it the weirdest big movie of the year. That combination — a monster movie that is also genuinely strange — is exactly what makes it worth seeking out.

It is also sparking real conversation. The ending has people arguing, with Mashable publishing an explainer and USA Today getting Ewan McGregor himself to walk through what it all means. A movie that gets audiences debating its final act is a movie doing something right.

The Dog Is the Real Star (and Hathaway Knows It)

Here is the thing that has taken over the internet: everyone is worried about Starbuck, the family dog. The trailer prominently features the Platt family’s canine companion, and in a movie where the neighborhood is overrun by dinosaurs, audiences immediately started asking the question moviegoers always ask: is the dog okay?

Hathaway addressed the concern directly in a recent interview with Complex, offering a spoiler-flavored reassurance about Starbuck’s fate. The role is played by real-life dogs Buzz and Brisket, who have apparently become minor celebrities in their own right. Without spoiling anything here: the internet’s dog-protection instincts were noted, and Hathaway had a lot of fun with the reaction.

Why Mitchell Was the Right Director

David Robert Mitchell is not an obvious choice for a dinosaur movie, which is exactly why it works. He announced himself with It Follows, a horror film that turned a simple monster premise into an anxiety machine, and followed it with the hallucinatory noir Under the Silver Lake. Both movies are about ordinary worlds quietly turning strange — a teenager stalked by an invisible entity, a young man unraveling a conspiracy across Los Angeles — and both are built on atmosphere, dread, and the sense that the rules are never quite what you think they are.

That is precisely the toolkit The End of Oak Street needs. The movie is not really about the dinosaurs. It is about the crushing, mundane horror of a family realizing their whole world has been uprooted — the lawn, the garage, the neighbors, all of it — and Mitchell shoots the neighborhood like a character: familiar, cozy, and suddenly deeply wrong. The dinosaurs are the payoff, but the dread is the movie.

For Fans of Survival-Horror and Strange Apocalypses

If the premise sounds familiar, you are not wrong — this sits in the same neighborhood as the best modern survival stories. The quiet, family-survival tension will resonate with fans of A Quiet Place, and the “civilization ends in your backyard” feeling echoes the grounded horror of The Last of Us. What makes Oak Street different is the scale of its strangeness: this is not a plague or an invasion, it is a whole street being physically removed from the world, which opens the door to the kind of head-scratching, what-is-going-on mystery that audiences love to argue about.

The Box Office Story Is Complicated — and Interesting

Here is where the summer-movie narrative gets honest: The End of Oak Street did not open like a blockbuster. Trade reports put its domestic debut at around $8.1 million (per Variety), which is on the soft side for a Hathaway-led release, on a weekend where Spider-Man: Brand New Day held the No. 1 spot with a huge third frame north of $65 million and the new Paw Patrol animated movie pulled in around $20 million.

But a soft opening is not the same as a failure. This is a movie with the kind of word-of-mouth that streaming built. Reviews this strong, an ending people cannot stop talking about, and a premise that is easy to pitch to friends (“a neighborhood gets teleported into dinosaur country”) are the ingredients of a slow burn. Expect it to hang around for weeks, and do not be surprised when it becomes one of the most-streamed movies of the fall once it lands on a service.

Why This Movie Matters Right Now

In a summer packed with sequels, remakes, and franchise installments, The End of Oak Street is a genuine original. It is a big-budget swing on a weird idea — no established IP, no cinematic universe, just a great premise executed with style. That is increasingly rare, and it deserves support from anyone who keeps saying Hollywood does not make original movies anymore.

It also scratches the same itch as the best of retro Amblin entertainment — the 80s-style suburb-and-supernatural vibe that shows like Stranger Things have made beloved again — while wearing its sci-fi strangeness proudly. If you like your apocalypses with a little more heart and a lot more weirdness, this one is for you.

Where to Watch

The End of Oak Street is in theaters now. A streaming date has not been announced yet, so if you want to catch it before the internet spoils every surprise — including whatever happens to the ending — the big screen is the place to do it. And if you are in the mood for more Hathaway sci-fi after the credits roll, Interstellar remains the gold standard, while her The Devil Wears Prada is the perfect palette cleanser for something with considerably fewer dinosaurs.

Have you seen The End of Oak Street yet? What did you make of that ending? And more importantly — did Starbuck make you as nervous as everyone else? Tell us in the comments.