JJ Abrams On Why End Of Oak Street Differs From Jurassic Park

When you think of dinosaur movies, there’ one franchise that rules them all: the Jurassic saga, that began with Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, and still continues to pull substantial box office today. While there have been other major movies involving prehistoric beasts – from early stop-motion cinema, to Peter Jackson’s King Kong, and recently the Adam Driver-starring 65 – it all comes back to that dinosaur theme park. But this summer comes The End Of Oak Street, a different kind of dino movie, from It Follows director David Robert Mitchell. Produced by JJ Abrams, it sees a suburban street – and its fleshy human inhabitants – somehow transported back to the time of those terrible lizards.

As Abrams tells Empire, its every setting is what makes Oak Street stand out from its toothy competition. “I think people are hungry for new stories, original stories, and to me, the undeniable appeal of this is the fact that it takes place in suburbia,” Abrams tells Empire. “I love the Jurassic movies as much as anyone, but those films, for the most part, take place in these beautiful jungles, these distant islands. David’s whole approach here was the juxtaposition of the absolute mundane suburban family life — swing sets and ice-cream trucks, and above-ground pools and school buses — and dinosaurs. If there’s any part of you that is excited by what you saw in the trailers, I can promise that the movie will deliver on everything.”

Mitchell’s monster influences run from those early cinema classics – The Lost World, King Kong, The Valley Of Gwangi – to The Twilight Zone, Signs, and Amblin movies. But he’s also deeply invested in the humans here – led by Ewan McGregor and Anne Hathaway, as parents Greg and Denise. “The family is not my family, but there are elements of some of the characters that resemble things that I experienced,” he says. “And some of it is like with my wife and our friends and family 1782848417. Everyone in the [Platt] family is dealing with normal, different little problems, and there are the ways in which they are communicating or not communicating.” Get ready for a fresh spin on a tale as ancient as prehistory.

Read Empire’s full The End Of Oak Street feature in The Odyssey issue, on sale Thursday July 2. Pre-order a copy online here. The End Of Oak Street comes to cinemas from August 14.