Dinosaurs 'invade' Chinese screens in Hollywood blockbuster

How would a family survive after waking up to find their neighborhood surrounded by prehistoric forests, with their lives under threat at almost every turn as hungry, meat-eating dinosaurs roam everywhere?

This is the horrifying opening sequence of The End of Oak Street, a Hollywood sci-fi film that opened across the Chinese mainland on Aug 14.

Set in the early 1980s, the film imagines a suburban neighborhood mysteriously engulfed by a blinding flash of light and transported millions of years into the past. A couple, played by Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, and their two children must find ways to survive rampaging prehistoric dinosaurs while navigating their own personal secrets and marital strains.

Influenced by his father, who dreamed of becoming a paleontologist and was always reading dinosaur books, David Robert Mitchell, the film's director and writer, said he had wanted to make a dinosaur movie since childhood.

A few years ago, while taking a casual stroll through his neighborhood, the filmmaker passed an interesting house and alleyway. The sight prompted him to imagine a dinosaur digging through the trash there, and that moment became the starting point for the story.

J.J. Abrams, the movie's producer, said he hopes audiences will leave the theater with several amazing sequences still fresh in their minds. He described the film's takeaway as "the thrill of seeing dinosaurs in a suburban setting", adding that the contrast between these wild creatures and a mundane neighborhood is spectacular.

Actress Hathaway said she was drawn to The End of Oak Street after being impressed by Mitchell's 2014 supernatural psychological horror film It Follows. She even called her representatives to arrange a three-hour meeting with the director in Los Angeles, and from then on, she knew she would work with Mitchell if he ever called.

The film held a premiere in a downtown Beijing theater earlier this month, with the venue decorated like a prehistoric world. Currently, the film has 9.7 points on Maoyan, a major ticketing platform.