The End of Oak Street comes home on Tuesday 15 September, when it arrives for digital rental and purchase on Prime Video, Apple TV and Fandango at Home, a month after opening in theaters on 14 August. A 4K, Blu-ray and DVD release follows on 3 November. The premise is right there in the title: the Platt family wakes up to find their entire street torn out of 1982 suburbia and set down somewhere else entirely, a place with its own residents, and none of them are friendly neighbors.
Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor play the parents holding the family together as the ground shifts under them, quite literally, and Maisy Stella leads the kids who have to make sense of a world that no longer matches the one they grew up in.
The film carries an unusual production story of its own. For years it existed only as Flowervale Street, a deliberately vague working title while J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot shepherded it through the kind of secrecy usually reserved for mystery-box thrillers. Warner Bros only settled on The End of Oak Street in February, right as the first trailer arrived.
That secrecy fits the director. David Robert Mitchell built his name on It Follows and Under the Silver Lake, films that turned an ordinary suburban block and a Los Angeles apartment complex into something quietly menacing. Here he points that same instinct at a studio budget and a family adventure, swapping creeping dread for full-blown spectacle, and the 86% on Rotten Tomatoes says the swap worked.
Michael Giacchino scores the film, and Industrial Light and Magic built the creatures that now share the neighborhood with the Platts, a sign of how seriously the production took the prehistoric half of its premise. It is a rare thing, a big studio swing from a director more associated with festival unease than four-quadrant adventure, and it plays best loud. If a theater near you is still showing it this weekend, that is the way to see it; otherwise Tuesday is close.
