Name: The End of Oak Street
Director: David Robert Mitchell
Genre: Science fiction, Thriller
Released: 2026
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, Christian Convery

For fifteen years David Robert Mitchell has been the American cinema’s quiet cartographer of the suburbs. The Myth of the American Sleepover drifted through the last night of a teenage summer; It Follows turned ordinary streets into a corridor of slow, walking dread; Under the Silver Lake let Los Angeles curdle into conspiracy. The End of Oak Street, his first film in eight years and his first for Warner Bros., takes that obsession at its word: the street itself is torn out of the world. That it now arrives on HBO Max is less a distribution footnote than a second hearing for an auteur who finally got a blockbuster budget, and a summer that left it little air.

The premise, as Warner Bros. lays it out, is pure Mitchell geometry. A mysterious cosmic event rips Oak Street from suburbia and drops the whole neighborhood somewhere unknown, and the Platt family learns that survival depends on staying together in surroundings they no longer recognize. Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor play Denise and Greg Platt, with Maisy Stella and Christian Convery as their children, Audrey and Brian. What the synopsis politely leaves out, and every trailer shouted, is what lives beyond the edge of the lawn: dinosaurs.

Aerial view of the Oak Street houses ending at a sheer cliff edge above an unknown forest — Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

Mitchell wrote and directed, and the producing team pairs him with J.J. Abrams, alongside Hannah Minghella, Jon Cohen, Matt Jackson and Tommy Harper. Behind the camera he reunites with Mike Gioulakis, the cinematographer of It Follows, while Michael Giacchino writes the score and John Axelrad edits. On paper it is a fascinating collision: the filmmaker of patient, static menace meeting the grammar of the creature spectacle, an indie formalist asked to frame something the size of a house.

In cinemas, the frame got crowded. The film opened to $21 million in North America and $26 million abroad, a $47 million global start on a reported $80 million budget, released at the tail end of a summer owned by Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey. Critics were kinder than the calendar. Den of Geek called it the best dinosaur movie in decades and JoBlo the best since the original Jurassic Park, while AwardsWatch dissented with a C-. Audiences, by Rotten Tomatoes’ own account, singled out Hathaway while finding the plot and the effects less convincing.

Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway huddled inside a car at night in The End of Oak Street — Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

The End of Oak Street makes its global streaming debut exclusively on HBO Max on Friday, November 13, and comes to HBO’s linear channel the following night, Saturday, November 14, at 8:00 p.m. ET. In the announcement, HBO Max folds it into a weekend movie offer built on the Warner Bros. catalog. Chris Bender, Jake Weiner, Joanne Lee and Leeann Stonebreaker serve as executive producers.

Mitchell has always filmed thresholds: the edge of adolescence, the edge of a city’s dream of itself. Oak Street ends at a literal cliff. Whether a home audience is willing to step over it is now the more interesting question than any opening weekend.