Yet again, horror is going out of its way to surprise people in 2026, with another movie that seemingly no one expected to make much money suddenly having a legitimate chance at becoming a success. The movie is called Buddy.
And if you haven’t heard of Buddy, the premise alone should get your attention. Written and directed by Too Many Cooks creator Casper Kelly, the movie takes the relentlessly cheerful world of a 1990s children’s television program and turns it into a nightmare. At the center of the fictional show It’s Buddy! is Buddy, a giant bright-orange unicorn voiced by Keegan-Michael Key who sings songs, plays games and teaches children wholesome life lessons. Think Barney & Friends, Blue’s Clues and Pee-wee’s Playhouse thrown into a blender — and then turned into a horror movie. When one of the children refuses to participate in Buddy’s activities and subsequently disappears, the other kids begin to realize that their colorful television world isn’t quite what it seems, and neither is their supposedly lovable host. The film also stars Cristin Milioti, Topher Grace, Delaney Quinn, Michael Shannon and Patton Oswalt.
And apparently audiences were willing to take a chance on something this bizarre.
Buddy has emerged as the latest independent horror success story, grossing an estimated $5,363,827 from only 1,258 theaters during its opening weekend. That’s roughly double the early projections of $2.5 million to $3 million. The Roadside Attractions and Saban Films release now holds the biggest opening weekend of 2026 for a movie released on fewer than 1,800 screens. It’s also reportedly the second-biggest opening in Roadside Attractions’ history and the largest opening ever for Saban Films.
The End of Oak Street, and I have some mixed feelings…
4 out of 10.. we will justify why..
First things first: SPOILERS. Lots of them. We’re basically going to spoil the entire movie here, so read at your own peril.
I went into this movie expecting something closer to a horror comedy. Instead, the comedic value was surprisingly low, the suspense was actually pretty high, and at certain points the whole thing somehow felt more like a really expensive direct-to-streaming movie than a major summer theatrical release.
I will say a plus here: JJ Abrams and company allowed us to really enter a world where it seemed feasible that dinosaurs would attack humans, and how they would be without mercy in their eating habits..
Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor lead the cast, alongside Maisy Stella and Christian Convery. Hathaway has been a star in huge movies.. McGregor as well.. .
JJ Abrams is one of the producers through Bad Robot, the company behind projects connected to Lost, Cloverfield, Star Trek and Mission: Impossible. And the movie was actually written and directed by David Robert Mitchell, the filmmaker behind It Follows. So there are a lot of people involved here who know how to make a movie.
All of that is star-studded..
Which makes some of the decisions in The End of Oak Street even stranger.
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SPOILER ALERT
Let’s start with what I liked most: the dinosaurs.
The violence of the T-Rex was fantastic, and there was something genuinely frightening about the quiet surveillance of the Titanboa stalking Anne Hathaway’s character until eventually it is almost right behind her. For real–this may have actually been the scene of the film with tension and silence. It worked perfect..
The dinosaurs, for the most part, looked shockingly good. I actually thought the visual effects were one of the strongest parts of the movie.
Except the dog.
I don’t know what happened with that dog. Maybe they couldn’t put an actual dog through everything required for the scene, but whatever combination of CGI or digital effects they settled on looked amateur compared to the eloquence of the dinosaurs..
And now let’s just cut to the biggest spoiler of all:
They kill Dad.
Of course they kill Dad. They kill Dad in pretty much every movie anymore, so why not this one too?
Except there’s a twist. And if you really want to know the ending, everything ultimately turns out okay.
Happy ending, I guess?
The basic concept is actually pretty interesting. We’re in 1982, meaning there are no cell phones, no internet and very limited ways of figuring out what is happening. When things start going wrong, you’re relying on radios .. and during this movie even the radio isn’t picking anything up, of course.
Eventually we learn that some sort of cosmic event or wormhole has essentially ripped Oak Street out of 1982 and thrown the neighborhood into a prehistoric world.. At least soon to be dead-dad theorizes this and his son agrees while the others doubt.. It turns out it was true. They knew a light was from something, so it HAS TO BE the wormhole..
Despite dad nailing it, the dinosaur also bit his leg off and devoured him in front of his shocked family.. as a dad I guess I take personal offense to this death scene.
There are also a lot of references to Cornell University and Carl Sagan through the daughter, Audrey. Eventually she gets her happy ending too, complete with the Cornell shirt. Of course, before getting there she has to experience the minor inconvenience of watching her entire town get destroyed and her father get eaten by a dinosaur.
College admissions essays should practically write themselves after that. But here’s where I had one of my biggest problems with the movie: the marriage.
Dad is certainly flawed. He’s secretly lost his main job, he’s working side jobs trying to keep the family afloat, he’s hiding things from his wife, and he’s taking a sips of whiskey and apparently reeks of alcohol when dinosaurs attack–mom decides to ask during the end of the world why he drank..
Meanwhile, Mom has apparently written an entire manuscript about leaving him and leaving the family.
And when the basement floods and the manuscript is destroyed, her misery factor goes through the roof.
Lady, DINOSAURS ARE EATING YOUR NEIGHBORS.
Your husband and children could die at any moment. Your entire neighborhood has apparently been sucked through some sort of cosmic wormhole and deposited into prehistoric hell, and we’re having an existential crisis over the manuscript about abandoning the family?
It just felt incredibly self-centered. That’s why I had trouble liking Anne Hathaway’s character for a large portion of the movie.
The film seems to want us to understand the breakdown of this marriage, but sometimes it felt as though the marriage problems mattered more to these people than the impending extinction of everyone around them.
Eventually she gets her redemption, realizes she can save everybody through a phone booth, and things improve considerably for her husband’s fate..
And somehow we’re eventually going to have to explain to Dad why there’s photographic evidence of him standing there giving a thumbs-up in front of two dinosaurs having sex.
Which brings us to THAT scene.
This is a PG-13 movie, so apparently we’re not going to have sex scenes between humans.
The dinosaurs, however?
The dinosaurs got it on. And they didn’t just give us a quick two-second visual joke and move along.
Oh no. We got angles, movement, and noises..
We got considerably more information about prehistoric reproductive behavior than I was expecting when I bought my ticket to the point where I felt somewhat vile afterward.
There are other moments that help redeem the movie. The crazy loon neighbor swinging a gun around and indiscriminately shooting before eventually being attacked by pterodactyls was entertaining. He kind of a Murray-ish role from Stranger Things. So was the surprise attack involving the librarian blowing away the prehistoric alligator-like creatures before they could devour him.
When The End of Oak Street embraces the insanity of its premise, it’s actually great.
It’s when it tries to make the collapsing marriage the emotional center of everything that I started checking out.
And then there’s the son. This poor kid gets the shaft.
The girl he’s apparently in love with ends up being interested in his sister instead. That angle gets thrown into the story too, and considering we’re talking about 1982, good luck to everybody involved navigating that situation once they get home.
But here’s where I think the movie missed its biggest opportunity.
I wanted a crazier ending.
Imagine they finally go through the wormhole except instead of simply restoring everything, Oak Street lands in 2026.
These people walk outside dressed like it’s 1982, completely bewildered by what they’re seeing, while everyone standing around the neighborhood immediately pulls out a cell phone and starts recording them.
Or go even further.
What if they arrived in 2026 and discovered that their older selves already existed there? Suddenly you’ve got this bizarre Back to the Future situation where the younger versions of these people are meeting the lives they were supposed to have.
Or, better yet, give us one final shot.
Everything is fixed.
Everyone is safe.
The portal closes.
Happy music.
Camera pans toward the trees.
ROAR.
One dinosaur made it through.
CUT TO BLACK.
That’s the ending I wanted.
Instead, J.J. Abrams, David Robert Mitchell and company decided to send us home feeling reasonably good about everything. Dad’s okay. The family apparently has another chance. The daughter has her Cornell future. Oak Street survives.
Happiness somehow pervades the bleak landscape of this once dinosaur-infested town.
And that’s fine.
I just wanted something a little more daring.
So all in all, I’m going 4 out of 10 for The End of Oak Street.
It’s not terrible. There are actually some really good suspense sequences, the dinosaurs look surprisingly fantastic, and there are enough completely insane moments to keep you entertained. But the plot is goofy, the emotional center didn’t work for me, some of the characters came across as bizarrely self-absorbed considering DINOSAURS WERE ACTIVELY EATING PEOPLE, and for a movie with this cast, this budget and this much talent behind the scenes, it sometimes strangely felt like something made for streaming.
Still, this is one I’d say you should see once in a theater, because the dinosaur sequences and visual effects benefit from the big screen.
I just watched The Last House on Netflix so you don’t have to.
No, really. You don’t have to.
If you want to, that’s fine. We just don’t think you should.
This thing was a total mess.
Don’t get me wrong, it starts with a somewhat interesting concept. These people are all stuck inside their houses, peacefully and happily celebrating Christmas and making little whimsical notes to their neighbors about what’s going on. It actually reminds you of those very innocent first days of COVID, when everybody was locked inside their houses, people were singing from balconies and making all of those ridiculous dance videos because none of us quite realized yet what we were in for.
And maybe that’s actually the best part of the movie.
Because from that point on, things get progressively worse for the family and, unfortunately, progressively worse for us as viewers.
While the premise is unrealistic, the way these characters faced this moment was TOTALLY unrealistic..
Some spoilers are coming, so read at your own demise.
At some point we’re introduced to the concept that these ill-fated homeowners simply cannot get out of their house. Rain constantly falls outside. Everyone in the neighborhood slowly runs out of food except for this particular family because Dad is apparently MacGyver and knows how to do everything, while Mom suddenly becomes capable of creating a vegetable garden inside the house.
The movie itself seems to be aiming for something much bigger than just a family trapped in a house. There are ideas here about isolation, survival, climate change, humanity’s relationship with nature and even the possibility that human beings aren’t necessarily entitled to this planet forever. That could have made for a fascinating movie.
The problem is that The Last House keeps throwing those ideas at you without ever really bringing them together. What begins as an eerie and almost believable story about a family adapting to an impossible situation eventually becomes so bizarre that instead of wondering what’s going to happen to these people, you start wondering what the hell the movie is doing.
The kids, meanwhile, don’t do much of anything to add to life. When they’re young, they basically say the adults will take care of everything, and that seems to remain their philosophy for most of the movie. It isn’t until near the end that they finally get some gumption and decide to actually do something.
And it’s only when they get that gumption that we finally see some form of oceanic monster. But apparently, according to everybody, these creatures were here longer than we were, so really it’s their planet and not ours.
Okay.
Meanwhile, the monsters are apparently content to allow everybody to slowly decay inside their homes while the land floods with salt water. Inside the house, everything is falling apart, but outside bears and other animals are apparently taking the land back again.
At some point we discover the house is sinking.
But don’t worry! The house can apparently keep surviving for years while Dad fixes his car, everybody ages, the world changes and this increasingly impossible structure just keeps hanging in there.
It’s a total mess.
Are there redeeming parts? Maybe here and there, but you have to sustain almost two hours of mostly dialogue, increasingly unrealistic survival techniques and some pretty amazing creativity from this family, including trapping animals through the chimney with what amounts to an automatic animal trap.
Listen, this movie had the complete tone of a Tubi movie that somehow wandered onto Netflix.
And that’s not necessarily an insult to Tubi.
The ratings on Rotten Tomatoes are deplorable, and after watching it, we can see why.
We wanted to like The Last House. We wanted it to be great. There’s actually a good movie buried somewhere inside this concept. Instead, what we ended up with was something that should have been completely forgettable.
Except it was so bad that we’re probably never going to forget it.
THE LAST HOUSE is officially now streaming on Netflix, starrimg Greta Lee and Wagner Moura.
The film follows a family that is mysteriously sealed inside their own home with no way out, forcing them to survive on dwindling supplies while an ominous force keeps them trapped.
Directed by Louis Leterrier, THE LAST HOUSE blends supernatural horror, survival thriller and post apocalyptic sci fi, with Netflix positioning it as one of its major August releases.
And the critics claim it is giving Tubi in its appearance and plot..
For better or worse…. The Hollywood Reporter writes that a new Nightmare on Elm Street movie is in the works, with Paramount Pictures having earned the rights to the franchise in order to bring the world of the horror classic to a modern audience.
The new film will be the first under the studio’s new label, Paramount Primal, which will “partner with up-and-coming storytellers as well as established filmmakers to produce smartly budgeted films across a variety of genres, including horror, comedy, action, and grounded science fiction.” (Read: low-budget filmmaking!) This initiative is led by J.D. Lifshitz and Raphael Margules, who produced Zach Cregger’s breakout film Barbarian.
There are no details right now so don’t get fooled by internet memes saying that Robert Englund is coming back because we have no idea who will be involved in and what fashion.
But hear us out, if they want to make this successful just hire on Michael Flanagan..
We already know that YouTubers have been a big splash in the horror world this year . Executives noticed too because it seems to be the best way to make money with the least amount of their work possible…
But much more appears to be coming.. from the Journal:
Producer Aaron Koontz made another movie with a YouTube creator two years ago, called “Shelby Oaks,” for which he raised the budget on Kickstarter because no one in Hollywood was interested. He was planning to sell “Mandela” earlier this year, then found out about “Backrooms” and decided to wait until the week that movie came out. As the bidding war escalated, Koontz and his partners started eliminating studios that didn’t seem to be as familiar with the material.
“They basically went into ChatGPT and said, ‘What’s the next ‘Backrooms?’” he said.
Numerous agents and producers are preparing pitches based on internet horror concepts that they plan to try to sell to studios in the coming weeks, people familiar with the matter said.
The next V/H/S installment is diving headfirst into the world of the SCP Foundation, and that should have horror fans paying attention. According to Bloody Disgusting, the upcoming film will bring the internet’s legendary catalog of mysterious anomalies and secret containment files to one of horror’s most successful anthology franchises. It’s another sign that SCP is continuing its journey from an online phenomenon into mainstream horror.
Personally, I think this is incredibly exciting.
There are already people complaining that Hollywood has run out of original ideas, but maybe that’s looking at it the wrong way. Some of the most creative horror concepts in the world aren’t coming from traditional studios anymore. They’re coming from YouTube creators, independent filmmakers, collaborative writing communities, and passionate fans who have been building incredible worlds for years.
If Hollywood wants to stay relevant, it should absolutely be looking at these creators and giving their ideas a bigger stage.
This is what horror has always done best. It evolves. Every generation finds its own monsters, its own storytelling style, and its own way to scare us. We’ve had slashers. We’ve had supernatural hauntings. We’ve had found footage. Now we’re seeing internet horror, analog horror, liminal spaces, Backrooms, and SCP stepping into the spotlight.
Enough with the same old slashers and bashers. Horror needs a new kind of monster to shake things up, and the SCP universe might be exactly the kind of fresh imagination the genre has been waiting for.
Something very interesting is happening in the horror world right now, and you cannot be entirely convinced studio executives saw it coming.
This summer, films like Obsession and Backrooms became breakout successes, proving that audiences are increasingly willing to embrace a newer and stranger form of horror storytelling. Now, as Hollywood often does, the race is on to capitalize before the mood changes.
In that light, Deadline Hollywood is reporting that another viral YouTube horror phenomenon is headed for the big screen.
The next adaptation will be The Mandela Catalogue.
And here is where things get especially interesting, particularly for older generations who may not have seen this coming.
Steven Spielberg is reportedly among the parties who aggressively pursued the rights during a highly competitive bidding war.
Yes, that Spielberg.
Creator Alex Kister is set to direct the project himself from a screenplay adapted alongside Tyler Clifton. For those unfamiliar, The Mandela Catalogue launched in 2021 and takes place in the fictional Mandela County, Wisconsin, where shapeshifting entities known as Alternates terrorize the population by taking the form of human doppelgangers.
The series has now surpassed one hundred million views online, inspired countless fan projects, and built an intensely loyal audience dedicated to expanding its mythology.
And frankly, analog horror is reigning supreme right now, and I think horror is better off for it.
There are always ebbs and flows to genre filmmaking. Generations change. Tastes evolve. What terrifies one era often gets dismissed by the next.
I promise you, the next generation will eventually come along and say that our modern horror era was terrible and that their version is better.
Just as many today dismiss the slasher boom of the 1980s.
Just as others once moved on from the era of black-and-white monsters and gothic horror.
It happens every single time.
So maybe the lesson is simple.
Enjoy horror while it is here in whatever form it takes.
If you genuinely love the genre, then you should embrace all of it, even when it does not look like the horror you grew up with.
And suddenly, a whole lot of people who have never heard of The Mandela Catalogue are now scrambling to figure out what exactly it is before a film adaptation arrives seemingly out of nowhere.
And somehow, in one of the stranger twists imaginable, a relic from Hollywood’s past has attached himself to one of horror’s newest frontiers.
Beginning August, a new live Broadway immersion into paranormal activity will occur ..
Early word is that the special effects will blow people away..
Paranormal Activity has moved up its Broadway opening date to Tuesday, August 25, at the August Wilson Theatre, several weeks earlier than previously announced.
The previously announced first preview performance of Friday, August 14, remains in place. The production will play a strictly limited 20-week run.
The synopsis: “James (Knight) and Lou (Álvarez) move from Chicago to London to escape their past, but they soon discover that places aren’t haunted, people are.” The original story inspired by the film franchise, Paranormal Activity “reimagines the modern ghost story with an intimacy that only live theatre can provide.”
The Broadway production will follow a strictly limited pre-Broadway engagement in Boston at the Emerson Colonial Theatre from July 11 through July 30. Prior to Boston, Paranormal Activity played engagements at Chicago Shakespeare Theater in Chicago, Center Theater Group at The Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles, Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington D.C., and American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. A production in Toronto at the CAA Ed Mirvish Theatre began performances on June 9 and will run through July 5.
