Could End of Oak Street Actually Be A Secret Cloverfield Movie?
Wouldn’t be the first time.
It’s not uncommon for movies — especially genre movies — to be reworked to fit in an existing franchise. Saw 2 was originally a script entitled The Desperate. Multiple Die Hard movies were just retooled spec scripts, and others were based on (unrelated) novels. Even the Dirty Dancing sequel, Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights, began as a political drama script that had dancing shoehorned in later.
But no franchise is better proof of this than Cloverfield. The franchise of sci-fi invasion movies began with 2008’s Cloverfield, but each of its two sequels, 10 Cloverfield Lane and The Cloverfield Paradox, were retooled from original scripts to fit into the “Cloververse.” Now, another movie is sparking speculation that it, too, could be part of this universe, despite the fact that it’s not being marketed as such: The End of Oak Street, the new movie from It Follows and Under the Silver Lake director David Robert Mitchell. Check out the haunting trailer for the movie below:
There’s not much that can be gleaned from the trailer, but it shows an idyllic suburban street where a mom (Anne Hathaway) and a dad (Ewan McGregor) live with their two kids, only to be interrupted when the entire street seems to be transported back to prehistoric times, leaving dinosaurs roaming the streets.
It seems like the perfect original sci-fi movie, tinged with the surrealism that Mitchell showed in Under the Silver Lake. So where’s the evidence that it’s secretly a Cloverfield movie? The clearest evidence is in the title itself. While it’s now being marketed as The End of Oak Street, originally it had a different title: Flowervale Street. Why the change? Perhaps “Flowervale” was tipping its hand a bit too much. Clover is a kind of flower, and “vale” means valley, which seems suspiciously close to “field.”
Then, there are the credits involved. J.J. Abrams, the creator of the Cloverfield franchise, is listed as a producer on this movie, and it’s his credit that’s shown first in the teaser trailer. Why would J.J. Abrams and Bad Robot Productions sign on to an artsy, high-concept sci-fi thriller unless there was another angle?
In case that wasn’t enough, there’s even a canon tease that a story like this exists in the Cloververse. The Cloverfield Paradox focused on how a scientific experiment caused strange anomalies all over space and time — the perfect circumstance for a town to be transported to prehistoric times.
Hiding a big franchise link from the marketing seems like a big missed opportunity, but the shock upon release might be worth it. In fact, something similar has happened before, or at least, almost happened. In 2020, 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg revealed on social media that his hit movie Prey was originally planned to be marketed as a standalone film, and its existence as a Predator prequel was meant to be discovered in the theater.
Perhaps that gimmick, which was foiled by Prey’s Hulu release, could be adopted by the Cloverfield franchise. If this theory is right, then it may just have ruined the surprise. But there’s no way to tell until release.
