Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor Fight Dinosaurs in a Movie That ISN’T Jurassic Park

In the latest trailer for an upcoming summer blockbuster, swelling music sets a fantastical scene. Regular people find themselves whisked out of their regular lives, on an adventure they never imagined. In a striking shot, we see their awe-filled faces as they look in wonder and terror at dinosaurs, somehow brought back to modern times. Ewan McGregor, my dear Anne Hathaway… Welcome to suburbia?

As much as Jurassic Park has become synonymous with dinosaur movies, thunder lizards aren’t actually intellectual IP owned by Universal and Amblin. In fact, not only can anyone make a dinosaur movie, but you can do anything you want with the creatures. That’s what writer/director David Robert Mitchell is doing with The End of Oak Street, a sci-fi adventure starring McGregor and Hathaway as suburbanites who find their neighborhood sent back to prehistoric times.

Of course, the trailer situates the movie in the past even before the first T-Rex makes an appearance. Set to a slowed down version of the Billy Joel track “My Life” (aka, the theme for the sitcom about Tom Hanks in drag), the trailer makes The End of Oak Street look like a lost Spielberg movie in which the dad stuck around. The central family has one of those round booths in their kitchen, the camera pans past a stacked cassette tape rack, and a boy wraps himself in blankets marketing the Christopher Reeves Superman movie.

Further, the trailer includes shots that seem to come from ’80s classics like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Poltergeist. In most cases, those homages would feel cloying, even after seeing the name J. J. Abrams in the credits. But the filmography of David Robert Mitchell suggests something more than mere imitation. In It Follows and especially Under the Silver Lake, Mitchell has demonstrated that he’s not interested in just replicating established tropes. Rather, Mitchell explores the reoccurring motifs in popular culture to find the persistent ideas that shape our imaginations.

None of that metatextual playfulness appears in the Oak Street trailer. Instead, the movie seems like it’s playing the story straight, putting a white-bread suburban family into a dinosaur adventure, in which pteranodons fly past power lines and ankylosauruses cut across freshly-mowed lawns.

Which is enough. At this point, the omnipresence of the Jurassic Park franchise is beginning to harm dinosaur movies as a concept. The first movie remains a perfect genre film, and even some of the sequels have their merits. But as Jurassic World Rebirth made very clear, the series is more interested in repeating familiar beats from the Spielberg film than it is playing around with dinosaurs. If feeding them a bunch of suburbanites is how we get new dinosaur movies, then we’re happy for The End of Oak Street to off as many ’80s Americans as needed.

The End of Oak Street arrives August 14, 2026.