For a film with dinosaurs in it, The End of Oak Street has been marketed like a secret. The premise is murky (time travel? dimension hopping?) and the tone of its new trailer errs towards mystery instead of spectacle. Note J. J. Abrams as the lead producer, and that the working title was Flowervale Street, and one question leaps out:
Is this film a Cloverfield prequel?
Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions has played this game before. 10 Cloverfield Lane started as something else (called The Cellar), but was then retrofitted into the franchise later on development. The Cloverfield Paradox did the same with a reality-tearing premise that was then bolted onto an increasingly loose mythology. Each film features monsters that come from a mysterious source, and that third one weaves dimension hopping into the mix.
Now look at the trailer for this new film. A quiet American street (with 1980 stylings that are a great fit for Abrams and Mitchell’s shared nostalgia for Carter-era Americana), seemingly lifted out of reality and dropped somewhere it shouldn’t exist. Recognisable life interrupted by something that doesn’t belong – that’s the engine of a Cloverfield, movie, whether it’s kaiju, spaceships or an alt-Earth (but mostly kaiju).
Then there’s that working title: Flowervale is a clear echo of Cloverfield.
If this were a straight Amblin throwback with creatures and scale, you’d think the marketing would have shown its hand. Instead it has held back – and the trailer shows the family exploring through a glowing white mist that’s reminiscent of that other great dimensional tear monster movie, The Mist.
None of this is proof, and so far there’s none of the tiny Easter eggs that helped to join up the other three Cloverfield movies: no Slusho, no Tagruato, no breadcrumb trail you can point to. But the Cloverfield films don’t need clean continuity. They are each about an unexpected rupture, with the logic of the shared universe mysteriously vague.
But a suburban street dropping into into a prehistoric vista gives big Cloverfield vibes… Has our family jumped to the past? An alternative dimension? Hell, maybe they’re in the far future, Planet of the Apes style, and through that mist they’ll find the wreckage of human civilisation. And among the “dinosaurs” perhaps they’ll find a creature we’ve seen before…
We shall see… when The End Of Oak Street comes to cinemas on August 14!
Whitlock&Pope 