UPDATE 8/23: The legs never came. Oak Street dropped 57 percent in its second weekend to $9 million and fell to fifth, with Friday off 71 percent from opening Friday, as Insidious: Out of the Further opened to $25.3 million in the next slot. Domestic stands at $38 million after ten days, $86 million worldwide with overseas at $48 million. The actual opening came in at $21 million, a shade above the Saturday estimate below. That is a 1.8x multiplier on a movie that needed 3x, against a net production cost Deadline put at $80 million to $92 million.
UPDATE 8/15: So what’s next for JJ Abrams? His comeback movie has already slipped to 2027, and Bad Robot’s Warner Bros. deal runs out first.
J.J. Abrams’ The End of Oak Street is tanking at the box office, and the audience Warner Bros. was counting on didn’t show up.
Per Deadline’s Saturday morning estimates, the Bad Robot dinosaur movie is heading for a $20 million opening weekend after an $8.1 million Friday at 3,446 theaters, including $2.5 million from Thursday previews.
That puts it at the very bottom of Deadline’s projected $20 million to $25 million range — with some sources seeing it finishing under $20 million — and continues Warner Bros.’ rough 2026 at the box office.
Making matters worse, the female audience that tracking suggested would help separate Oak Street from a typical monster movie stayed home. Friday’s crowd was 59 percent male, with women accounting for just 41 percent.
Less Than Half Of The Meg, Even With PAW Patrol
The comparisons all week were The Meg and Rampage. Oak Street is opening to less than half of The Meg‘s $45.4 million and 44 percent below Rampage‘s $35.7 million, and both of those numbers are from 2018 ticket prices.
The comp Deadline reached for on Friday was worse. Oak Street‘s $2.5 million in previews matched Mickey 17, the Warner Bros. original sci-fi movie that opened and flopped to $19 million last year on a budget north of $100 million.
Then there is PAW Patrol. The Paramount movie has no premium large format screens at all, while Oak Street‘s IMAX and PLF showings account for close to 15 percent of its weekend, per Deadline. Same $20 million, higher ticket prices, and a lot of the puppy tickets are selling at children’s prices. On admissions, PAW Patrol is ahead.
Deadline describes PAW Patrol as overperforming while Oak Street‘s camp believes it has a path to $20 million. That contrast tells you which way the weekend is drifting.
For scale, The Odyssey is doing $23 million in its fifth weekend on a 27 percent drop, carrying Nolan’s epic past $500 million domestic. A movie in weekend five is beating the new dinosaur movie in weekend one, and Spider-Man: Brand New Day did $71 million in weekend three as it moved into fourth on the all-time domestic list, past Avatar.
B CinemaScore, 51 Percent Recommend, 77 Percent Audience Score
Wednesday’s story was 85 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, higher than every Jurassic sequel. Friday’s story is that audiences do not agree.
Opening night crowds gave Oak Street a B CinemaScore. That is below The Meg‘s B+, and it is the same grade Disclosure Day pulled in June, when Steven Spielberg’s summer movie followed its B with a $44 million opening on a $115 million budget. The movie critics spent the week calling a Spielberg homage just got the same report card as Spielberg.
Masters of the Universe took a B in June too, and lost 71 percent of its audience the following weekend.
PostTrak’s definite recommend came in at 51 percent, which Deadline called meh. PAW Patrol pulled 63 percent with an A CinemaScore. Disclosure Day managed 61.
Rotten Tomatoes tells the same story. The audience score sits at 77 percent against the 85 percent from critics, and 77 percent is exactly where Jurassic World: Dominion lives, one point under the first Jurassic World at 78. Critics said this was the best dinosaur movie since 1993. Audiences are rating it like another Jurassic World movie.
That matters more for Oak Street than for almost anything else this summer, because legs were the entire pitch. An $80 million movie opening at $20 million lives or dies on word of mouth, and a B with a 51 percent recommend is not the word of mouth that builds a 3x multiplier.
The Hathaway Crowd Didn’t Show
For two months, the tracking story was women.
The Quorum had interest running ahead of awareness on the strength of Anne Hathaway, and Deadline flagged her as a strong first choice among women as recently as Tuesday.
Here is who actually bought a ticket Friday, per PostTrak: men over 25 at 45 percent, women over 25 at 28 percent, men under 25 at 14 percent and women under 25 at 13 percent. Kids under 12 were 10 percent of the crowd, family adults 17 percent.
So the female-leaning family audience that was supposed to separate this from a generic monster movie turned out to be 59 percent male and nearly three-quarters over 25, which is the crowd that shows up for any dinosaur movie on opening night. They came, and they graded it a B.
The women who were supposed to be the difference stayed home, or went to Spider-Man.
Another Warner Bros. Miss In A Year Full Of Them
The studio angle makes it worse.
A year ago this weekend, Weapons opened to $43.5 million and became the sixth of a record seven consecutive Warner Bros. releases to debut above $40 million domestically.
That studio went on to become the first to cross $4 billion at the 2025 global box office, and it did it on 11 movies with nine No. 1 openings.
In 2026, the same studio has not had a single opening above $40 million. Per TheWrap, all seven Warner Bros. releases before Oak Street opened under that mark, with Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights the biggest of the bunch at $241 million worldwide. Oak Street makes it eight for eight.
The misses were expensive ones. Supergirl and The Bride! were outright bombs, Mortal Kombat II underwhelmed and completely tanked, and the only Warner Bros. titles to turn a theatrical profit this year were a pair of R-rated New Line horror movies that opened small.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s latest quarterly report showed theatrical revenue down 46 percent year over year, against comps that included A Minecraft Movie and Sinners. The company’s own shareholder letter conceded the first half of the year “admittedly fell short of our expectations,” with Supergirl named.
And the movie beating Oak Street in its fifth weekend is the one Warner Bros. lost. The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s second film at Universal since he walked out over the HBO Max day-and-date fight, and it is crossing $500 million domestic while his old studio’s summer gets matched by a PAW Patrol movie.
The trades already treat Dune: Part Three in December as the year’s rescue for WB. That is one movie against eight, and Oak Street was supposed to be the late-summer stopgap in between.
Bad Robot Needed A Hit. It Didn’t Get One
Deadline now puts the net production cost anywhere from $80 million to $92 million, citing heavy VFX, and pegs the global opening at $38 million to $48 million with foreign expected to outweigh domestic.
We wrote Tuesday that an $80 million net movie wants something around $200 million worldwide once marketing is counted. A $40-something million global start with a B CinemaScore has no realistic road to that number.
Which brings it back to Bad Robot. The company is closing its Los Angeles office with its Warner Bros. first-look deal expiring at the end of the year, and Oak Street was the last exhibit in the was-Bad-Robot-worth-it debate.
The exhibit arrived Friday. It reads: bottom of the range, half of The Meg, and a photo finish with a preschool cartoon.
As for what comes next for Abrams himself, The Great Beyond, his first movie as director since The Rise of Skywalker, was already pushed to October 2027, ten months after that deal expires.
Oak Street had one week of open road before Insidious: Out of the Further takes the next slot on August 21. It used that week to earn a B.
These are Saturday morning estimates from Deadline. Studio weekend numbers land Sunday and actuals Monday, and the trade flags that Oak Street could finish under $20 million once the Saturday matinees are counted.
The tracking said people would like this movie once they found out it existed. Enough of them found out to hit the bottom of the range. Then they gave it a B.
Ewan McGregor also spent time promoting the movie, saying he wants to end his career with Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The End of Oak Street is now in theaters, starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, with J.J. Abrams producing. For the full summer picture, see our summer box office tracking roundup.
