People love dinosaur movies, but for decades now, the Jurassic Park franchise has had a monopoly on the concept in the pop-cultural zeitgeist. A franchise like The Land Before Time was able to breakout in a big way, spawning innumerable straight-to-DVD sequels over the years, but that’s largely because the original film released in 1988, several years before Spielberg’s instant classic would stomp onto the scene in 1993. Hell, one could make the argument that Jurassic Park’s iron-clad grip on the general audience’s imagination as it pertains to these prehistoric beasts was so instantaneous that even the other Spielberg-adjacent dinosaur film of 1993, Amblimation’s We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story failed to become a hit.
In the years since then, other films have tried, such as the Adam Driver-starring 65 or the recent Aussie effort Primitive War, but none have been able to really break through to audiences in any palpable way. But now, it looks as though David Robert Mitchell’s recently released dinosaur-filled science-fiction horror adventure film, The End of Oak Street, may finally be breaking the curse. The film performed admirably in its opening weekend and continued to do well this past weekend in its subsequent frame, recouping its budget and setting itself up for long-term success.
In its opening weekend last week, The End of Oak Street grossed $21 million domestically. While that’s not an enormous sum of money, it was a more-than-solid initial return on investment for an original modestly budgeted (relatively speaking) blockbuster effort. Now, in its second weekend, it persevered and grossed $11 million domestically, bringing its worldwide total up to $86 million, surpassing its $80 million budget. In order to fully pass over into earning a profit, the film will need to continue to perform well to account for marketing costs, but given its current trajectory, it looks likely to do just that.
This is a win for not only the film, not only David Robert Mitchell himself, but also audiences as a whole. Mitchell rose to acclaim back in 2014 when his high-concept horror film It Follows earned critical and commercial success. In the years since then, that film’s reputation has grown only all the more palpable, with it having spearheaded and strongly influenced an entire new wave of horror films in the decade-plus since. And yet, it rarely felt like the writer-director was reaping the rewards of that success, as after the underperformance of Under the Silver Lake, his career seemed to stall a bit.
Fortunately, The End of Oak Street saw him very much returning to form, earning rave reviews once again and now reaching benchmarks for early commercial success as well. On top of all of this, he’s literally currently in production on the It Follows sequel, They Follow, so he’s well and truly back, which absolutely rules.
But beyond that, it’s wonderful that audiences are still discovering The End of Oak Street in subsequent weeks, because it’s just a fantastic time at the multiplex. Anecdotally, after having enjoyed the film so much the first time around, I took some folks to go see the movie this past weekend for a Saturday matinee, and the theater for the film was full, and the audience was going bananas. It’s difficult to overstate just how well the film’s most surprising and suspenseful moments play, especially with a packed house of general audiences. Mitchell excels at playing the audience like a fiddle, and it was just a joy to feel the film working so well in this setting.
Altogether, it looks as though The End of Oak Street is set up for sustainable financial success, breaking the Jurassic Park mold (at least a little bit) and showing audiences that other filmmakers can do other things with dinosaur-fueled mayhem beyond the boundaries of endless Jurassic World sequels.
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