Spoiler warning: this piece discusses the ending of “The End of Oak Street,” now playing in theaters.
Ewan McGregor’s character doesn’t survive “The End of Oak Street” in the version originally written, and the actor is now confirming just how differently the whole story once ended. McGregor described the sci-fi thriller’s original conclusion as one where his character, Greg Platt, stayed dead, and his family never made it home at all.
The film, from writer-director David Robert Mitchell, follows the Platt family after their 1982 Michigan neighborhood, fictionally named Flowervale, gets swept into a prehistoric era by an unexplained cosmic event. In the version that made it to theaters, Greg dies protecting his family from a dinosaur attack, only for his wife Denise (Anne Hathaway) and their children to travel back through a time portal and pull him to safety before it happens. McGregor described the discarded finale as landing Denise and the kids in the prairies during the era of early settlers, having overshot their jump through the portal entirely and never making it back to their own time at all, a version of events he called “more interesting” than what audiences ultimately got, according to USA Today’s interview with the actor.
That original ending left Greg out of the equation entirely. “They hadn’t made it back to their own time, and poor old Greg wasn’t there,” McGregor said, a detail ComingSoon.net, which first wrote up the interview, noted stood in sharp contrast to the more redemptive finale audiences ultimately got.
The creative team’s reasoning for the swap was straightforward: they wanted a definitive, more hopeful conclusion rather than leaving the Platts stranded in yet another crisis without their father. McGregor also compared his character’s dinosaur attack to Samuel L. Jackson’s sudden shark-attack death in “Deep Blue Sea,” describing the beat as a genuinely funny moment designed to catch audiences off guard, a comparison Mandatory highlighted from the same conversation.
Even with the happier ending intact, the film’s mechanics leave room for a darker reading. Screen Rant’s breakdown of the twist argues that the family’s rescue effectively creates a new timeline altogether, meaning a different version of Greg, in some other branch of events, may still be the one who died protecting them. Forbes picked up on the same unease, pointing to the film’s final scene, where a framed photo shows the other Greg, the one who didn’t make it, still smiling in front of the dinosaurs that killed him. A separate breakdown from Yahoo goes further into the time-travel logic itself, weighing whether the film functions as a true time loop or simply spins off an entirely separate timeline once Denise pulls Greg through the portal.
Whichever reading holds up, McGregor seemed at peace with how it all shook out. Asked about the tangled mechanics of the film’s time travel, he said he mostly tried not to overthink it and just delivered his lines, adding that he was simply glad to make it to the end of the shoot in one piece.
