‘End of Oak Street’ is the ‘Twilight Zone’ and ‘Jurassic Park’ mashup you didn’t know you needed

Hello, Popculturology readers. I’m back from a week in the Outer Banks. Pop culture news barely took a breather while I was on vacation, but I’m now back from posting up at the Corolla Beer Garden while ordering from Corolla Pizza. (I’m also well acquainted with the Food Lion in, you guessed it, Corolla.)

The world has moved on from the live-action Moana remake, but Dwayne Johnson is still trying to spin the box office and critical failure of the project. “Our first two reviews came out,” Johnson told People. “I’ll never forget it … They were amazing. I was like, wow.” And then? “It went another way,” Johnson added.

Welp ...

You should go see The End of Oak Street this weekend

In a summer movie season dominated by Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey, there’s a good chance that the film that’s gonna stick with me the longest will actually be The End of Oak Street.

I’ve been intrigued by this time travel/dinosaur movie, helmed by It Follows director David Robert Mitchell and produced by J. J. Abrams, since the first trailer came out months ago. From that first trailer, I loved the Twilight Zone vibes surrounding that early peek at The End of Oak Street.

If you had the same hopes I had, you’re not going to be disappointed by The End of Oak Street. It’s the Twilight Zone story that Jordan Peele’s reboot struggled to capture a decade ago. And at the same time, The End of Oak Street is the Jurassic Park story that countless directors have struggled to tell since Steven Spielberg’s original movie.

The End of Oak Street is creative, funny and tense. That the family led by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor’s characters gets teleported to a world of dinosaurs isn’t a secret. But Mitchell does a stellar job knowing when to tease what dinosaur is lurking in the shadows and allowing the camera to pan around a neighborhood now densely populated with said dinosaurs.

A few years back, Asher Elbein, an author who has written some fantastic pieces on dinosaurs, noted on Bluesky that one of the issues with modern dinosaur movies is that once Spielberg decided what dinosaurs looked like with Jurassic Park, that style became the standard. The End of Oak Street thankfully breaks that aesthetic, giving us dinosaurs covered in so many feathers that some of them look downright wooly.

If you’ve seen Spider-Man: Brand New Day and you’re still waiting to snag those IMAX tickets to The Odyssey, do yourself a favor and go see The End of Oak Street this weekend. Movies like this are in danger of going extinct, and the studios need to know that we’ll support the good ones.

I also need people to see The End of Oak Street so we can discuss that ending ...

‼️ THE BIG STORIES

To me, my X-Men casting announcements

Disney’s D23 showcase is tonight, and the buzz makes it sound like we might get an official announcement for the cast of Marvel Studios’s upcoming X-Men film. The trades have broken a couple bits of casting news over the past week or two, and we already know that Spider-Man: Brand New Day’s Sadie Sink is on board.

We’ve also gotten rumors that Beef costars Cailee Spaeny and Charles Melton would be playing Rogue and Beast. And then we got a rumor that Melton had dropped out. I guess we’ll see tonight ...

• Emma Frost better be Australian: Few actresses are on a hotter streak than Samara Weaving. The Ready or Not and Over Your Dead Body star has reportedly been cast as Emma Frost. Mad Men’s January Jones previously played the mutant in X-Men: First Class. (Deadline)