Box Office Showdown: Dinosaurs vs. Spider-Man

Warner Bros.’ dinosaur survival thriller pulled $2.5 million Thursday night, and ‘PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie’ joins the fight too. Neither one is catching Tom Holland, but that might not be the point.

Late August is usually a quiet stretch at the box office. Not this year. The End of Oak Street and PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie both open this weekend, and both happen to be about dinosaurs, which makes for one of the stranger head-to-head matchups of the summer.

Neither film is actually trying to beat Spider-Man: Brand New Day, though. That fight was decided weeks ago. What they’re really doing is testing whether anything can still pull an audience while Tom Holland’s web-slinger keeps setting records on its way out the door.

Warner Bros. released David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street in 3,400 North American theaters. The Sci-Fi survival thriller grossed $2.5 million in Thursday previews. The studio is projecting an opening weekend between $18 million and $23 million.

That’s a real number for a film without a built-in franchise behind it, and it arrives at an especially important moment for Warner Bros. Every one of the studio’s seven releases this year has opened below $40 million domestically. Because of that, Oak Street is quietly one of the more closely watched titles on the calendar, whether or not the marketing has made that obvious.

A Stacked Cast For An Original Premise

Anne Hathaway, Ewan McGregor, Maisy Stella, and Christian Convery star in the film, which comes from Bad Robot and carries an $80 million production budget. Mitchell, the director behind 2014’s It Follows, wrote and directed the movie himself.

It follows a family in the early 1980s whose suburban neighborhood is suddenly dropped into a place teeming with prehistoric predators.

For Hathaway specifically, Oak Street is one piece of a genuinely enormous 2026. She’s also leading Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and The Devil Wears Prada 2 this year, with the thriller Verity still to come in October.

Not many actors get three major releases in a single summer, let alone one where all three are getting real theatrical pushes.

What The Critics Are Saying?

The End of Oak Street holds an 85% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, a number that’s arguably doing more for the film’s prospects than its marketing has. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney called it “mindlessly entertaining in a big-dumb-fun kind of way,” and other critics have praised the way it balances a Jurassic Park-inspired premise with real dark humor and unexpected heart.

At the film’s premiere, Hathaway told THR she was grateful “that audiences want to go see original things, and this movie is really original.” Given how rare a wide theatrical release with zero franchise DNA has become, that gratitude tracks.

PAW Patrol Brings Its Own Dinosaurs

Also opening this weekend is Paramount’s PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie, which started with $1.9 million combined from Thursday and paid Saturday previews. The third feature in Spin Master Entertainment’s animated franchise is rolling out to more than 3,500 North American locations, with Paramount eyeing a domestic opening in the mid-to-high teens. Internationally, the film has already crossed $35.4 million across 30 markets. Its production budget sits at $39.5 million.

Carter Young, Mckenna Grace, Terry Crews, Jennifer Hudson, and Snoop Dogg all lend their voices to director Cal Brunker’s film, which drops the franchise’s canine heroes into a world full of dinosaurs.

The previous entry, 2023’s PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie, opened to $22.7 million domestically before finishing with $205 million worldwide, itself an improvement on the $144 million global total for the original 2021 film. The franchise, adapted from the Nick Jr. series that launched in 2013, has grown with each installment. 

Dino Movie currently holds an 86% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, with THR’s Frank Scheck noting that while the material is “thoroughly juvenile,” it still delivers real value for its young audience.

Spider-Man Just Keeps Climbing

None of this changes who’s actually winning the weekend. Sony’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day is heading into its third weekend still expected to top the chart.

Earlier this week, Destin Daniel Cretton’s Tom Holland-led sequel became the fastest film ever to cross $700 million domestically, adding yet another record to a run that’s already reshaping how the rest of the summer gets measured.

Two more films round out the weekend: the McConaughey-led thriller The Rivals of Amziah King, and The Wrong Girls, a stoner comedy led by Kristen Stewart.

Between the dinosaurs, the talking dogs, and Spider-Man’s continued dominance, this is about as crowded as late August box office weekends get.