What It Is
An August 2026 Warner Bros. release from David Robert Mitchell (It Follows, Under the Silver Lake), with JJ Abrams producing. Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor play Denise and Greg Platt, a suburban couple whose marriage is quietly rotting in the summer of 1982. They have two teenagers, Audrey and Brian (Maisy Stella and Christian Convery). One night on Oak Street, something cosmic happens, and by morning the whole block is sitting somewhere it shouldn't be. Jungle is chewing through the backyards. There's a cliff where the cul-de-sac used to end. And the neighborhood is not alone.
What It Gets Right
Mitchell shoots suburbia like he did in It Follows — clean lawns, wide lenses, an anxious hum in the middle distance — and that instinct pays off the second the ferns start swaying wrong. The first-act house-and-marriage stuff is doing real work: Hathaway plays Denise as a woman two decades into a compromise she can't name, and McGregor lets Greg be small and defensive in a way movie dads rarely are. When the reveal lands, the couple's problems don't magically evaporate, which is the whole point. Christian Convery is a genuinely funny kid actor. And the period detail stays out of the way — nobody stops to explain the Rubik's Cube.
Where It Falls Down
The dinosaurs look like the budget ran out around week nine. Some shots are legitimately great, some look like a mid-tier streaming show, and the movie cannot fully hide the difference. Mitchell is a mood director, not an action director, and a couple of chase sequences read as competent instead of urgent. The teenagers are thinly written next to the parents. There's a stretch in the middle where the neighbor characters exist mostly to be worried on-camera. If you came for a monster movie with wall-to-wall carnage, you'll feel the pacing.
Who'll Love It, Who'll Bail
People who liked Signals-era Shyamalan, Super 8, or the quieter Spielberg move where the family stuff is the actual plot — you're going to have a good time. Fans of It Follows willing to accept Mitchell in a bigger, sillier register, same. You'll bail if you want Jurassic Park with the volume up; the film is stranger and more domestic than the trailer sells. Also skip if ropey VFX is a dealbreaker, because it will be a dealbreaker in at least two scenes.
The Verdict
WORTH IT because the script is doing something real underneath the premise. The Platts' marriage is the movie's actual engine, and Mitchell trusts the audience to sit with a slow-burn suburban dread before letting the roof come off. Hathaway and McGregor are playing adults, not archetypes. The messaging, such as it is, stays inside the drama — nobody is monologuing about the Reagan years or nuclear families; the era does the work through wardrobe, wallpaper, and the specific pressure of a 1982 kitchen. It's not a great movie. The effects are uneven, the back half loses a step, and the kids deserved better pages. But it's a swing with a point of view, and those are rarer than dinosaurs.