The week splits cleanly between multiplex counterprogramming and a rare event picture. Family franchises dominate the schedule, from a digital arrival to two theatrical openings, while genre fans get something rarer: a filmmaker back after a long break, working at real scale.
Minions & Monsters becomes available to buy or rent digitally from Tuesday, closing out Illumination's prequel trilogy with the Minions engineering their own monster movie inside old Hollywood. The joke of the franchise, that these barely intelligible henchmen keep landing box office hits anyway, gets a strange coda here: the film crossed $450 million worldwide yet still finished as the lowest earner in the Despicable Me series to date. Pierre Coffin again voices nearly the entire principal cast himself, the arrangement that has defined the Minions since the character debuted in 2010.
Friday brings a wider release for The End of Oak Street, the first film from David Robert Mitchell since Under the Silver Lake in 2018. Mitchell sends an ordinary family from their 1980s neighborhood into a world where dinosaurs still roam, a premise closer to his early suburban unease than to a theme park attraction. The project spent years in development under the title Flowervale Street, and Oscar Isaac was once attached to the lead role Ewan McGregor now plays opposite Anne Hathaway.
Mitchell has pointed to Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Poltergeist as direct references rather than vague inspirations. Early footage plays that homage straight while pushing further into real horror than a family creature feature usually allows, treating its transplanted dinosaurs as animal and threatening rather than cute. The film reunites Mitchell with his regular cinematographer Mike Gioulakis and adds a Michael Giacchino score, and producer J.J. Abrams has said the spectacle only works because the family at its center is worth watching first.
Two more family openings crowd Friday's theatrical slate. PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie sends the pups to a storm hit island to rescue a stranded pup while stopping a mining operation from triggering a volcano, and All Wishes Come True! follows eight streetwise mortals talking their way past a set of gods to earn the title of Eight Immortals. Streaming fills out the rest of the week: the marriage thriller The Invite arrives Tuesday, and The X Files film I Want to Believe returns to Prime Video and Hulu on Friday, bringing Mulder and Scully back for a case built around a psychic ex priest and a kidnapped agent.
For a cinema trip, Oak Street is the one built for a big audience and a real screen, while the PAW Patrol and Eight Immortals openings cover younger or lighter tastes. At home, Minions & Monsters is the easy watch, and the X Files rerelease is worth it for anyone who never got to the show's feature run, with The Invite as the tighter, more adult option.
