David Robert Mitchell premiered The End of Oak Street on August 9 at the Steven J. Ross Theater in Burbank. The film opens nationwide August 14. It marks his first major studio production: an $85 million Warner Bros. picture, produced by J.J. Abrams, starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as a family whose suburban neighborhood is transported to a prehistoric landscape by a mysterious cosmic event.
The concept grew out of a feeling Mitchell has carried since childhood. "I'm just calling back (to) that feeling I had as a kid, where I could be in the yard looking over to the dead-end street nearby, looking down into the woods," he told The AU Review in an interview published August 10. The decision to set the film in the early 1980s was equally personal. "It was probably a little bit of personal expression and a bit of memory," he said.
The dinosaurs emerged from a simpler starting point. "I thought it would be cool to try and make a dinosaur film, but I wasn't sure what the way into it was," Mitchell explained. Placing them in a recognizable suburban setting gave him his entry. The film casts prehistoric creatures as an extension of neighborhood dread, a sensation Mitchell has mined before in It Follows and Under the Silver Lake.
His methods remained precise even at this scale. "I like to put a lot of love into the camera placement and whether something is subjective or objective," he said. Cinematographer Michael Gioulakis, who shot It Follows, returned for the film. Composer Michael Giacchino scored it. The production shot in London and Atlanta over roughly ten weeks in 2024, originally under the working title "Flowervale Street." The film runs 99 minutes. Reviews lift August 12.
