Somewhere between 1977 and 1984 I don’t remember sitting through a bad summer. I stood in line for hours with friends for movies I knew almost nothing about, because there was no internet waiting to hand me the entire plot two years early, and the trailer wasn’t going to show me the last twenty minutes of the film out of order. We got Star Wars and both of its sequels in that stretch. We got Superman, E.T., Ghostbusters, Gremlins, Goonies, Back to the Future. My whole personality was assembled in a dark room with sticky floors and I’ve never gotten over it, and I don’t especially want to. The theater I saw most of them in isn’t there anymore. Neither is the department store where my dad used to buy me the toys that went with them. That’s the part nobody warns you about with nostalgia, that the movies survive and the buildings don’t.
The End of Oak Street was made by somebody who was standing in a line like that too, and for ninety-nine minutes it comes closer to that feeling than anything else I’ve seen this year.
It’s the summer of 1982 and the Platt family is coming apart at the seams in the quietest possible way. Denise, played by Anne Hathaway, has been writing a book in the basement without telling her husband, which is a marriage status report all by itself. Greg, played by Ewan McGregor, is out of work and taking whatever odd jobs turn up at whatever hours they turn up. The kids ride their bikes around a subdivision where nobody locks a door and get into the kind of trouble that gets forgotten by dinner. Then one night the sky lights up and everybody assumes it’s the power going out, and by morning the entire street has been dropped into the Cretaceous with the houses still standing and the residents very much on the menu.
Writer and director David Robert Mitchell made It Follows twelve years ago on nothing and scared the daylights out of people with a wide shot and some patience. He’s got Warner Brothers money now and J.J. Abrams producing, and the interesting thing is that he spends the first forty minutes refusing to use it. A swing set goes flying across a yard for no reason you can see. A clothesline shakes. Something enormous moves behind a privacy fence at exactly the height where the fence hides it, and the theater I was in went completely silent in a way that theaters almost never do anymore, everybody leaning the same direction at once, waiting. That is the thing I have been missing, and it has almost nothing to do with the effects, because what I go back for is the room full of people.
The 1982 setting is doing real work here, and it’s worth saying so, because the complaint I keep reading is that the period amounts to wardrobe. Nobody in this movie can call anybody. There is no phone in a pocket, no map, no way to look up what is happening or ask a stranger on the internet whether anyone else is seeing this. A family in trouble in 1982 has whatever is in the garage and whatever is in their own heads, and what turns out to be in the daughter’s head is all the Carl Sagan she read for fun, which is how this family arrives at the word wormhole at all. Put the Platts in 2026 and somebody has the whole thing diagnosed on a phone before the first act is over, and the movie stops existing.
Mitchell shoots it like 1982 too, which is a different thing from setting it there. He works in split-diopter and other technique that was standard when I was a kid and has been out of fashion for decades, so the frame itself behaves the way frames behaved back then, and your eye goes where it used to go. Add the hair and the wallpaper and a couple of Pat Benatar needle drops, and there’s a running bit about a neighbor waging a private war over a dog using his lawn as a bathroom, who discovers a substantially larger deposit and concludes somebody is messing with him. My theater came apart. Somebody two rows back was still laughing four minutes later.
Hathaway is carrying the picture and she knows it. She’s playing a woman who spent ten years being disappointed politely and then gets dropped into a situation where politeness is no longer on the table, and she plays that turn without ever once winking at the audience about how great she’s doing. McGregor is good in the scenes he’s given and there aren’t enough of them, which is the script’s fault rather than his. The dinosaurs are the weakest characters in the movie, and I say that seriously, because Jurassic Park spent thirty years teaching us that a dinosaur can have a personality, and these ones are mostly obstacles that show up when the plot needs somebody chased. The ending is convenient and will not survive five minutes of conversation in the parking lot. I walked out into the August heat feeling good anyway, which used to be the entire job description for a summer movie, so I’ve decided to let it slide.
Now let’s talk about the other thing, because there’s a whole apparatus attached to this movie and it deserves to be looked at in the light.
One guy posted online that he walked out partway through and typed his grievances in capital letters, spoiling the film’s biggest turn on his way out the door, out of pure spite. His list of red flags runs like this. The married couple bickers. The husband got laid off. The wife is secretly writing a book about being unhappy. She gives him grief about drinking. The son can’t hit a dinosaur with his bow while the mother doesn’t miss with her rifle. The family takes in an orphaned girl of a different race, which in his math tips the household to three females and one boy. A librarian turns up with a shotgun. That’s where he left.
He is not an outlier. There’s a website that reviews movies on a wokeness percentage, assigns this one a rating of “Woke-ish,” between twenty-six and fifty percent, and then puts the actual explanation behind a paywall with a button asking you to join the fight against the Woke Mind Virus. Their reviewer describes Hathaway’s character as a nagging, arrogant shrew who resents her traditional home life. There are YouTube channels running the same material at length, and there are commentators tying the whole thing to Abrams by name, which is a nice reminder that the man who directed the Star Wars movie a lot of these same people cheered for has since been reclassified.
So look at what’s actually in the indictment. A marriage under strain. A man out of work and humiliated by it. A woman with an inner life she’s hiding from her husband. A child who is worse with a weapon than his adult mother, because he is a child. A family that takes in a kid with nobody left. Put Roy Scheider and Karen Allen in those exact scenes in 1979 and every one of these people would call it a classic and complain that Hollywood doesn’t make them like that anymore. The objection has nothing to do with politics being inserted into a dinosaur movie and everything to do with a wife getting written as a person while the camera stayed on her, which a certain kind of viewer experiences as something being taken away from him.
Which brings me to the slogan, and I want to be as clear about this as I can be. “Go woke, go broke” is a myth. It has never described anything. It is not a prediction, because a prediction can fail, and this one never does, because it gets applied backward after the receipts come in and quietly withdrawn from everything that made money.
Look at the ledger. Barbie made a billion four hundred million dollars and was called woke for a solid year before it opened. Black Panther cleared a billion three. Wicked, Inside Out 2, Frozen II, Lilo and Stitch, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, every one of them accused in advance, every one of them enormous. There is a famous list floating around the internet of everything that supposedly got woke and went broke, and the entry I love most reads that The Last Jedi got woke and Solo went broke, because The Last Jedi made one and a third billion dollars and the man writing the list had to reach over and pin the failure to a different movie. That is the entire theory in one sentence. When the woke thing succeeds, the failure gets reassigned to whatever’s standing nearby.
And when something does flop, it flops for the reasons movies have always flopped. It cost too much, or it opened against something bigger and nobody bothered.
Which is where Oak Street comes in, because yes, it opened soft, around twenty million domestic against a budget north of eighty, and that number is already being carried around like a trophy. Here is what that number actually contains. A PG-13 dinosaur movie released in the dead middle of August, into the third weekend of a Spider-Man that is closing on eight hundred million domestic, on the same day another dinosaur movie opened for the kids, sharing its premium screens with a Christopher Nolan picture that won’t leave. It landed at eighty-five percent with critics and a B from exit polling, meaning the people who went liked it fine. That is a scheduling story that anybody in distribution could explain to you in about ninety seconds.
There’s also the thing nobody factors in when they wave an opening weekend around like a verdict. People have stopped going to everything. They go to events, and event is a short list now, so the dinosaur movie that isn’t part of a franchise gets triaged into the wait pile, because the wait is about six weeks to rent it and about three months to have it turn up on something you already pay for. Polling this year confirms what people have already worked out on their own, which is that you hold off unless the theater is offering something the living room can’t. And the wait pile is where the supposedly broke movies go to make their money. Wonder Woman 1984 drove enormous numbers on Max. Snow White, the poster child for the whole go-broke argument, turned around and posted huge numbers on Disney+. The nastiest part of the math is that a soft opening speeds itself up, since a studio watching a movie underperform will sometimes cut the window to as little as seventeen days to start making the money back. So an eighty million dollar dinosaur picture opening to twenty in mid August is telling you about a habit, and there is nothing ideological in it.
Meanwhile the woman at the center of the alleged wokeness has had a year. The Odyssey is past a billion dollars worldwide and is now the biggest movie Christopher Nolan has ever made. The Devil Wears Prada sequel is somewhere near seven hundred million and gave Meryl Streep the biggest opening weekend of her life. Same actress, same twelve months, and nobody has explained to me which of those was the non-woke one.
The End of Oak Street is silly and a little dumb about physics and it made me feel exactly the way I felt at eleven years old with a soda I couldn’t finish and a movie I hadn’t seen a single frame of in advance. Go sit in the dark with a crowd. It’s the last good weekend of the summer for it.
Grade: B+
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