The End Of Oak Street was born from a random passing thought in the mind of director David Robert Mitchell: “It’d be really interesting if there was a dinosaur right there.” Where? Anywhere, that’s where.
So here’s Oak Street, a scifi dinosaur thriller that may or may not involve time travel. It’s written and directed by Mitchell, the guy who brought us the strangely liminal It Follows, and JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot. The story’s pretty clear from the trailer: A 1980s suburban neighborhood gets sheared away from its usual location and sent back (or forward or away) into the land of the dinosaurs.
I just wonder if we’ll see any Slusho. One bit of info floating around is that, in Santa Monica, California, Oak Street sits near Cloverfield Blvd and ends right at Clover Park. Get it? The end of Oak Street? All of those are right in the general vicinity of the former Bad Robot Productions HQ. So is there a Cloverfield connection?
Where there’s a Bad Robot, there might be a Slusho. If you don’t know what Slusho is, it played a major role in the Cloverfield ARG back in the day, and has popped up in many Abrams projects over the years, including Alias, Fringe, Star Trek, once in Heroes, and even somehow in an old episode of Kenan and Kel. Just check out this overview. You can’t drink just six!
A ton of theories are out there about what’s going on in Oak Street. Is there a direct connection to the Cloverfield Paradox, some wonder, via the Shepard Particle Accelerator? Let’s hope not, but a quick scene from that cinematic disaster does allude to five city blocks vanishing…
Beyond that, what might The End Of Oak Street say about modern suburbia? Does it speak to our disconnection with the rest of the world? To growing anxieties? Do the dinosaurs represent gas prices, or the urban sprawl encroaching on suburbia itself? Or are they just dinosaurs, let loose due to a cosmic anomaly (or science experiment gone wrong), a la Capcom’s Dino Crisis? Sometimes, you just want to see dinosaurs wreck things.
We’ll find out when The End Of Oak Street lumbers into our own neighborhoods on August 14, 2026.
