Wisteria Lane was best known as a fictional street for eight seasons on the soapy primetime ABC series “Desperate Housewives” from 2004 to 2012.
But it’s also an actual street in Southwest Atlanta where fun popcorn thriller “The End of Oak Street,” which opens in theaters Aug. 14, shot several key scenes in the spring of 2024 over a span of three months.
Set in Michigan in 1982, the film, stars Anne Hathaway (“The Devil Wears Prada”) and Ewan McGregor (the “Star Wars” prequel trilogy) as the Pratts, a struggling married couple with two teenagers who find their entire neighborhood transplanted through a wormhole into the distant past where dinosaurs reigned. (Even with nods to Carl Sagan, does the science make any sense? Does it matter?)
Acclaimed film producer J.J. Abrams (“Lost,” “Star Trek”) and director David Robert Mitchell needed a neighborhood that still resembled 1982. Wisteria Gardens, south of Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. in Adamsville not far from I-285, fit the bill.
Production company Bad Robot provided The Atlanta Journal-Constitution with a short statement explaining why Wisteria Gardens worked for the film after an extensive search across metro Atlanta. They liked how the neighborhood has changed “remarkably little since the 1960s. Its mature trees, authentic homes and untouched streets became the perfect stand-in for suburban Michigan and provided the ideal foundation for Oak Street.”
Location scout Ian MacGregor, who has also worked on Apple TV+’s “Cape Fear,” Marvel’s “Thunderbolts” and Disney’s “Agatha All Along,” did not respond to queries from the AJC.
Credit: Courtesy of Warner Brothers (above), Rodney Ho/AJC (below)
Credit: Courtesy of Warner Brothers (above), Rodney Ho/AJC (below)
The Wistera Gardens residences are largely single-story brick ranches and split-level homes built in the 1960s and 1970s with few teardowns or massive renovations.
As a result, the crews didn’t have to do much to go back in time. They replaced modern cars with 1970s-era vehicles like an AMC Pacer, a Plymouth Satellite and a Ford Maverick. They swapped out modern plastic garbage bins with vintage metallic cans and threw in some old-school BMX bikes in the front yards.
“They added bushes, trees, swings,” said Phyllis McCoy, who has lived on Wisteria Lane for 23 years. “They made changes to some people’s homes. People had the option to keep the changes or have it changed back to normal.”
The producers paid the McCoys a couple of thousand dollars for the inconvenience of shooting on her block at all hours and occasionally forcing her to find parking on other streets.
She recalled watching a dinosaur chase Hathaway and McGregor’s characters, a scene which opens one of the movie trailers.
“We enjoyed it,” she said. “It was funny watching the actors react to a man holding a stick with a dinosaur head on it.”
Credit: CREDIT: (Above) screen shot from Warner Brothers trailer, (bottom) Rodney Ho/AJC
Credit: CREDIT: (Above) screen shot from Warner Brothers trailer, (bottom) Rodney Ho/AJC
McCoy also saw the film crew build out extra rooftop on the split-foyer home used as the Pratt residence. The actors, including Hathaway, shot scenes on that roof.
During a night shoot, she recalled producers placing a shattered old vehicle in the middle of the street. She also saw an above-ground pool installed in a neighbor’s backyard where, in the film, a huge prehistoric eel slithers out.
Credit: CREDIT (above) courtesy of Warner Brothers (bottom) Rodney Ho/AJC
Credit: CREDIT (above) courtesy of Warner Brothers (bottom) Rodney Ho/AJC
McCoy plans to see the film this weekend after studying the multiple trailers, parsing out every image that featured her street. “I’m looking forward to it,” she said.
Credit: Courtesy of Warn
Credit: Courtesy of Warn
Credit: RODNEY HO/AJC
Credit: RODNEY HO/AJC
A block party, which opens the movie, was held three blocks away from her home on Dover Ct. and Dover Blvd., McCoy noted.
The Wisteria Gardens neighborhood, her husband Thomas McCoy said, “is quiet, peaceful. All good. No dinosaurs! Anne Hathaway stood in my yard.” (Neither of the McCoys ended up speaking to the actors though they did interact with some crew members.)
Credit: Courtesy of Warner Brothers (below) Rodney Ho/ajc.com
Credit: Courtesy of Warner Brothers (below) Rodney Ho/ajc.com
Prices for homes in Wisteria Gardens, which encompasses only a few blocks, are relatively modest. Two vintage homes in the neighborhood are listed on Zillow: a five-bedroom multi-split home for $232,000 and a split-level fixer-upper for $270,000.
The movie calls Wisteria Lane “Oak Street.” There are two nearby streets that use “Oak”: Charter Oak Drive and Oakside Drive. (During production, the film was dubbed “Flowervale Street” and that name is referenced at the end of the film during a fictional newscast.)
Early reviews of “The End of Oak Street” have been mostly positive, with an 85% “fresh” rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
“This movie is Spielbergian to its core, and writer-director David Robert Mitchell pays tribute to the king of the blockbuster with all the thrilling set pieces and kids in peril that fans could ever hope for,” wrote Inverse’s Katie Rife.
Mitchell “keeps things moving fast enough that it’s easy not to think too hard about the dumb decisions the characters make or the plot holes that are big enough for a Giganotosaurus to lumber through,” said the Houston Chronicle’s Cary Darling.
Variety predicts a modest opening of $20 million to $30 million for the PG-13 film this weekend on 3,400 screens. The movie’s budget is around $80 million so it will require solid word-of-mouth to make back its budget.
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