Early Rotten Tomatoes chatter is turning The End of Oak Street into one of the summer’s most talked-about releases before audiences have even seen it. The science fiction thriller, directed by David Robert Mitchell, is drawing comparisons to Jurassic Park and, in some cases, being called the best dinosaur movie since 1993.
That matters now because the film is set to hit theaters on August 14, and the reviews are landing with unusually loud praise for a movie that is still ahead of its release date. Anne Hathaway leads the cast as part of the Platt family, alongside Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella and Christian Convery, giving the project a recognizable face as critics start to frame it as a summer surprise rather than a routine genre entry.
The strongest notices have come from David Ehrlich of IndieWire, who gave the film an A- and called it the biggest surprise of the summer. Zachary Lee of RogerEbert went further, giving it four out of four stars and calling it the most thrilling dinosaur movie in ages. Clint Gage of IGN landed in the middle with a Good 7 out of 10, saying Mitchell leans into his Spielbergian influences and mostly succeeds. Taken together, those reactions explain why the movie is already being talked about in the same breath as Jurassic Park.
That comparison is not tidy, though, and that is part of what makes the early response interesting. Owen Gleiberman of Variety called the film end-of-the-summer trash, even as he described it as a loopier and, in some ways, better Jurassic movie. He also called it preposterous but shamelessly fun. In other words, the movie is being praised as a crowd-pleasing homage and dismissed with equal confidence, which is exactly the kind of split reaction that can make a release feel bigger than its marketing.
For Mitchell, whose first feature in eight years is now being measured against the dinosaur benchmark that Jurassic Park set in 1993, the question is not whether The End of Oak Street has gotten attention. It has. The question is whether that attention turns into the kind of turnout that lets a dinosaur movie with a mean streak and a wink live up to the noise it is making now.
