One of the most anticipated and mysterious movies of summer 2026 is The End of Oak Street. Directed by David Robert Mitchell (It Follows), The End of Oak Street stars Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway as a couple who, along with their two kids, discover their street has moved and is now filled with dinosaurs. When it comes to dinosaurs on screen, the movie franchise that comes to mind first is Jurassic Park. This has naturally led to The End of Oak Street being compared to Jurassic Park.
Speaking with Empire, The End of Oak Street producer J.J. Abrams revealed what separates The End of Oak Street from Jurassic Park. “I love the Jurassic movies as much as anyone, but those films, for the most part, take place in these beautiful jungles, these distant islands. David’s whole approach here was the juxtaposition of the absolute mundane suburban family life — swing sets and ice-cream trucks, and above-ground pools and school buses — and dinosaurs,” said Abrams, who is producing The End of Oak Street through his production company, Bad Robot. Abrams thinks the setting will be a hook that draws audiences in:
“I think people are hungry for new stories, original stories, and to me, the undeniable appeal of this is the fact that it takes place in suburbia…If there’s any part of you that is excited by what you saw in the trailers, I can promise that the movie will deliver on everything.”
Abrams’ quotes about The End of Oak Street seem to promise audiences what the Jurassic World sequels failed to deliver. Despite the ending of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom hinting at dinosaurs finally walking among humans in new environments, including a velociraptor in the suburbs, the sequels quickly backtracked. Jurassic World: Dominion was widely criticized for focusing too heavily on locusts rather than dinosaurs, and then Jurassic World: Rebirth backtracked on the development of the two previous installments, bringing all the dinosaurs back to the island setting.
Despite dinosaurs being a concept any studio can make movies about, for nearly 35 years, Universal’s Jurassic Park has seemingly had a stranglehold on the genre. The most serious attempts at dinosaur films tend to fall into two camps, with one being animated kids films, like Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs or the upcoming PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie. The other is mid-budget genre thrillers, like 65 or The Primitive War.
Warner Bros., though, is betting The End of Oak Street will be a hit, even giving it the same second-weekend-in-August release date Weapons opened to in 2025. Like Weapons, The End of Oak Street is an original movie marketed on a compelling central hook. For Weapons, it was where the kids went; for The End of Oak Street, it is where the street moved to and why there are dinosaurs. The End of Oak Street might not reach Jurassic Park‘s box-office numbers, but it could offer audiences a new type of film that the Jurassic franchise can’t deliver.
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