David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street is as much a nod to Rod Serling as it is to classic Spielberg.
Its redolence of The Twilight Zone episodes like “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and “The Odyssey of Flight 33” was enough to convince J.J. Abrams to hop aboard the film as producer.
“I jumped at the chance to work on such a wonderful Twilight Zone concept with a writer/director I was already a huge fan of,” he said in the official production notes. “The wild ‘what if’ premise felt like a perfect fit. Flawed characters in the right, out of this world situation is a wonderful combination.”
The idea of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances is what Serling’s groundbreaking anthology excelled at.
“Rod wasn’t a snob,” The Twilight Zone Companion author Marc Scott Zicree told SYFY Wire in a 2024 interview. “He wrote about bank tellers and sales girls and regular people. It’s very rare that he’s writing about the president of the United States or something. That’s not his interest. His interest is regular people living their lives and facing the unknown and hopefully surviving.”
That certainly applies to The End of Oak Street, in which the all-American Platt family— Greg Ewan McGregor), Denise (Anne Hathaway) and her two kids, Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery)—is suddenly forced to evade the snapping jaws of hungry dinosaurs after their entire neighborhood is thrown back to prehistoric times.
Another staple of The Twilight Zone, of course, was its penchant for twist endings. Oak Street almost nearly played into that great tradition of pulling the rug out from characters (and viewers) alike with open-ended conclusion worthy of the fifth dimension.
The End of Oak Street ‘s Original Ending Carried a Twilight Zone-esque Twist
The original plan was to have Denise and her two kids hop through a wormhole they believe will take them back to 1982.
It does manage to take them back to the future, but a little shy of their ultimate destination, as they end up “in the prairies during the settlers’ times,” McGregor revealed to USA Today. “They hadn’t made it back to their own time, and poor old Greg wasn’t there.”
In the end, Mitchell and Abrams opted for a much more upbeat ending where Denise and the kids return to 1982 just before the time travel event is about to occur. This allows them to warn a number of people (including Greg, who had been eaten just a few scenes earlier) to escape the impending wormhole.
“When I saw the movie, I saw it with someone who had lost their father, and they burst into tears at the ending,” Hathaway told Entertainment Weekly. “They said, ‘Actually, it’s just what I want from a movie like this, and it could only happen in a movie, and I love it.’ And so I just want to give my absolute credit and hats off to J.J. and David for coming up with that ending.”
Even so, it’s still a bittersweet turn of events when you realize that Denise has just selfishly condemned the past versions of herself, Audrey and Brian to contend with the dinosaur threat without any help from Greg.
How To Watch The End of Oak Street
The End of Oak Street is now in theaters. Click here for tickets.
Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone air regularly on SYFY. Click here for complete scheduling info!
