We Need to Talk About The End of Oak Street’s Supposed Happy Ending

Spoilers follow for the end of The End of Oak Street.

While it starts with the simplest possible tone for a summer blockbuster — a Spielbergian family drama steeped in sci-fi — The End of Oak Street swerves headfirst into farcical chaos. Your mileage may vary, but watching Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor protect their kids from feathered dinosaurs using shotguns and sledgehammers is an absurd delight. However, just as absurd are the directions the story takes from that point on, and the mechanics by which its central family secures their eventual happy ending. David Robert Mitchell directed the L.A. conspiracy comedy Under the Silver Lake, but this might just be his weirdest film.

The End of Oak Street is a hoot and a half, but its resolutions yield far more questions than actual answers. When the Platt family’s small town is mysteriously transported 200 million years into the past, secret author Denise (Hathaway), her even secret-er alcoholic husband, Greg (McGregor), their adventurous tween son, Brian (Christian Convery), and their bookish college-age daughter, Audrey (Maisy Stella), are left to fend for themselves while searching for their family dog, the loyal Starbuck. Along the way, they discover sedan-size wormholes popping up throughout the neighborhood, which quickly disappear before materializing elsewhere. The how and why of it doesn’t really matter — nor should it, in a tale of parents on the brink of divorce discovering how to make it work for their children.

This makes things all the more disorienting when, near the final act, Greg’s leg is chomped off by an allosaurus mid-mallet-fight, before the dino proceeds to eat him headfirst. Did they really just kill the dad?, you might wonder, though less out of grief than confusion over where the central story line can go from here. Well, the movie sort of cheats its way out of this quandary, when Denise, Brian, Audrey, and the neighbor girl they help along the way — the now-orphaned Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis), with whom Audrey shares some cute chemistry — finally make their way through one of the aforementioned portals. They end up back in 1982, on the outskirts of town, on the same rainy night their street was originally shipped to the past.

Jeannette runs off to warn her parents, while Denise smartly makes a couple of calls from a nearby pay phone. She rescues not only minor characters who died during the film’s events — she tells them to hightail it out of town before they’re wormholed, and they somehow listen — but she also lures Greg far away from their house with a fake pizza order (he’s been secretly working as a delivery driver after losing his job). The neighborhood still disappears, and their house is swapped with a patch of Jurassic land — flora and fauna included — which leads to a fun little epilogue where the U.S. military, uh, executes the dinosaurs point blank. 

Two years go by and all seems well. Denise writes a book about the events she lived through (titled The End of Oak Street, of course), and the Platts celebrate with Jeannette’s family, who she similarly rescued before they were beamed into the past. A happy ending, right? Not so fast! We have some questions about everything that transpires both during and potentially after these final scenes — which, upon further reflection, make up an extra movie’s worth of material, if not more.

1. 
Hold on, there are two Jeannettes now?

Before the movie cuts to credits, the Platt family can be seen hosting a barbecue in their backyard. Their only guests appear to be Jeannette — standing adorably hand in hand with Audrey; it’s nice that Denise and Greg are hip — along with Jeannette’s parents, as well as a second Jeannette, who strolls into frame at the last moment. It’s presented like a fun little button, implying that the Jeannette who lived through the movie’s dino mayhem successfully warned her mom and dad, as well as the past version of herself, of what was about to happen, allowing them to escape the wormhole’s radius just in time.

But what have these last two years looked like for both Jeannettes? It certainly must have felt strange for the Jeannette we followed (let’s call her Jeannette I) to have to convince her parents and a version of herself (just a few days younger; let’s go with Jeannette II) to suddenly sprint out the door. Back to the Future is still a few years away, so there’s probably little cultural shorthand for Jeannette I to quickly relay things (even if she had the time). But more pertinently: How does this family navigate the ensuing logistical and emotional hurdles?

Surely, the parents are happy to be alive when they demonstrably would have died — the disappearance of Oak Street lends credence to Denise’s story — but imagine living your life as usual, only for an alternate version of yourself to invade it, claim your parents as her own, and now you and your surprise identical twin are also suddenly homeless because your house was just sent tumbling through time. That has to be a nightmare from a paperwork standpoint alone, though one can assume the government might be willing to make an exception for a second Social Security number for the same person, since they seem to be aware of what transpired. That’s a story worth telling, too, because now you have the conundrum of who is the authentic Jeannette, and how their differing experiences with grief and dinosaurs might lead them down different paths. But the movie’s ending also implies an alternate version of the events that have just unfolded, which leads us to … 

2. 
Do the movie’s events still happen?

The story’s cyclical structure forces us to assume a Tenet or Avengers: Endgame scenario where “what’s happened, happened,” so the versions of Denise, Brian, and Audrey at the end of the film still experienced everything we saw. However, Denise’s ploy to lure Greg away from home at just the right time means that this alternate present has now created a domino effect: an alternate “past” in which Denise, Brian, and Audrey still get stuck in the Jurassic period, and still have to fend off dinosaurs, only without their patriarch.

How exactly does that go? Do things pan out the same way, or does Greg’s absence make their survival that much more unlikely? Remember, Greg died saving Denise from the allosaurus, so does she become its lunch instead? And since the gun-toting librarian who would go on to save the remaining Platts at a vital moment was among the neighbors rescued from this second teleportation, does this mean the children perish too? 

Worse yet, does the now-surviving Greg know all this? Denise put it all in her book, so surely he’s aware that the wife and kids he just left behind to greet these “new” ones on the hilltop have now been transported to certain death. Either that or some combination of them survive and make their way back to yet another alternate present where they try to warn people, setting off a chain reaction of infinite Platt families displacing and replacing themselves on infinite Oak Streets. That’s fun to speculate, but it’s nothing compared to the more concrete question we still have about Denise and the kids’ reunion with this pre-time-travel Greg.

3. 
Does Greg and Denise’s marriage actually survive?

Based on what we’re shown, the couple seems happy two years after the film’s events. However, the version of Greg that came clean to Denise about being fired, stopped drinking, and stepped up for his family now resides in the belly of a dinosaur. This second Greg never went through the events of the past that Denise did, and it takes two hands to clap and to repair a marriage. What reason does this Greg have to make any meaningful changes in his life, other than Denise relaying his own phantom character development from events he never lived through? 

Maybe the original Greg, who put down the whiskey bottle to stay alert as dinosaurs circled outside, wouldn’t have given up drinking in the long run, either — I suppose we’ll never know — but this new Greg 2.0 has to live with the knowledge that the wife and kids he spent his life with have been flung through time and left to die. That’s bound to make anyone fall back off the wagon, and it probably doesn’t bode well for Denise, Brian, and Audrey either, who now have to live with the inebriated ghost of someone they all watched die horribly in front of them. There’s a whole other movie here, Mitchell! Where is it? And, most important, what effect does the ending of The End of Oak Street have on other movies?

4. 
Does Steven Spielberg still go on to make Jurassic Park?

The movie’s Amblin-esque tenets are bound to keep Spielberg on viewers’ minds, so we’re left with no choice but to wonder what effect the brief presence of feathered dinosaurs in the real world will end up having on the director’s 1993 dino classic. Do scientists run genetic experiments on them, leading to some kind of real-world Jurassic (bird) Park? Does Michael Crichton still write a 1990 novel speculating about what this would be like? If he still writes it, does this lead to Spielberg still making the movie, but suddenly all dinos in Jurassic Park (and pop culture at large) are depicted with their more scientifically accurate, but less cinematically appealing, feathery forms? That’s a pretty horrifying thought.

However, it’s just as likely that the mid-’80s arrival of Denise’s book, The End of Oak Street, supplants Crichton’s Jurassic Park as the world’s preeminent dinosaur text. Does this lead Spielberg to make a movie based on her book instead? Wait, does he make this movie? Is that why Mitchell attempts to copy Spielberg’s themes and style to this degree? We need a disclosure day for these answers, and we need it now.