Goodbye, Flowervale Street. Hello, David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street. Way to take lemons and make lemonade, Warner Bros. We’re assuming that, given JJ Abrams’ presence as a producer, someone at WB suggested that it might not be the best idea to use a title for this ’80s-styled sci-fi feature that directly implied that it would be a new Cloverfield spin-off (“flower vale” being a particularly unsubtle nod in that direction), though nobody knows exactly what the hell the rights situation with that franchise is anyway. But that’s a pretty solid new title, with a fun dual-purpose pun in there as well for dad-joke enthusiasts.
That gag is rooted in a striking image of a neighborhood seemingly plucked out of existence and superimposed on the prehistoric world — the boundary being both “the end of Oak Street” and the circumstance being the “end” of the suburb as Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor’s family know it. And dinosaurs. Yes, friends, the rumors were true: this is a Dino picture, though you’ll only get a tantalizing tease of one in the 90-second trailer that they dropped on Thursday.
Peep it:
Huh! That looks fun. We can’t help but root for Mitchell, who is 3-for-3 in our book (though, unlike most, we’d put Under the Silver Lake and The Myth of the American Sleepover above It Follows), though the three release date changes and its final placement as a “Hot January” debut seem to stress that WB doesn’t have too much faith in this one. Still, hope endures.
Here’s a synopsis for The End of Oak Street:
“After a mysterious cosmic event rips Oak Street from suburbia and transports their neighborhood to someplace unknown, the Platt family soon discovers that their very survival depends on them sticking together as they navigate their now unrecognizable surroundings.”
The End of Oak Street will magically appear in theaters on August 14. Stop making Sleestack jokes. They already tried to make Land of the Lost for “modern” audiences sixteen years ago, and it didn’t work.