There's a real tendency in both film and TV writing to summarize J.J. Abrams' career as simply as possible. He's the Alias guy, or the Fringe guy, or the architect of the Chris Pine Star Trek era. If you really know (a specific type of) ball, he's the creator of Felicity, and if you run a ragebait YouTube channel, you're probably still performatively pissed at him for The Rise of Skywalker. J.J. Abrams has been active in entertainment for longer than people realize, and he's always had a lot going on.

This week marks the theatrical debut of one of Abrams's first original projects in years: he served as one of the producers behind David Robert Mitchell's The End of Oak Street. As part of the run-up to the new film's debut, let's take a look at Abrams' strange career in the entertainment industry, from rom-coms to the apocalypse and everything in between, skipping past the obvious picks like Star Trek, Star Wars, and Super 8.

        *Forever Young *(1992)


















This is such a weird movie, man. "Jeffrey" Abrams, early in his career, wrote the screenplay for this '90s drama. Mel Gibson plays Daniel McCormick, a test pilot in 1939 who loses his fiancé in a car crash. That leads him to volunteer for his buddy's experiment in cryogenic suspension, because being asleep for a year sounds better than living with his grief.

Naturally, things go wrong, and McCormick wakes up 53 years later. With the cops on his trail and his body not quite as well-preserved as you'd think, McCormick has to race against time to figure out what happened to him and why.

Abrams originally wrote the movie under the name The Rest of Daniel, and sold it to Warner Bros. for a then-record price of $2 million. Reporters at the time mocked the sale, but Forever Young ended up making $128 million at the box office, so I suppose Warner Bros. knew what it was doing — back then, anyway.

        *Armageddon *(1998)


















 Almost 30 years later,* Armageddon* is a frequent punchline. Several generations of filmgoers have grown up making fun of Michael Bay's *sturm und drang* approach to directing, and *Armageddon* admittedly gives them a lot to work with. Its premise alone — about a team of oil drillers who are hastily trained as astronauts in order to reach and destroy a planet-killer asteroid — is goofy enough to spawn a thousand thinkpieces. (And yes, it *would* be easier to teach astronauts how to drill.)

When you were actually in the theater, though, Armageddon is too big to really question. It's one of those movies that drags you along by sheer momentum, but falls apart once you have a second to think about what you just saw. Abrams is one member of the team of writers who was brought on to polish Armageddon's script, which was reportedly made as a direct reaction to the then-upcoming disaster film Deep Impact.

        *Alias *(2001)


















Abrams created and originally ran this ABC show about Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner), a young CIA agent who discovers her "secret task force" is actually a criminal organization. After her fiancé gets murdered, Sydney opts to join the actual CIA as a double agent.

Alias is typically credited with putting Garner on the map as an actress and is probably the most successful show from the post-Buffy the Vampire Slayer wave of the early 2000s. If what you wanted out of your TV experience was a lady in leather pants spin-kicking someone in the head, there were a few years there where you were spoiled for choice.

Watching the later seasons of Alias now, it's also hard to ignore how much it influenced Assassin's Creed, though Abrams didn't have much to do with that. One could go so far as to say that a live-action adaptation of Assassin’s Creed is entirely superfluous, because season 5 of Alias already exists.

        *Lost* (2004)


















 To some extent, we all now live in the entertainment landscape that *Lost* built. It was absolute appointment television for years, as millions tuned in every week to find out just what the hell was happening.

Since then, Lost has become just as infamous for its seat-of-the-pants writing style. No one could guess what was happening in Lost because the writers didn't know either.

Abrams only ran the first season of Lost, leaving after that to direct 2006's Mission: Impossible 3, and Damon Lindelof took over from there. Abrams' influence lingers over the rest of the show's run, however, and it's a big part of what made him a household name.

        *Fringe* (2008)


















 It doesn't seem likely that something like *Fringe* would be greenlit today. At best, it'd be a streaming show that might get one season before being quietly canceled. There's no way it would've gotten five seasons on a major network in 2016, let alone 2026.

Depending on how you look at it, Fringe is either a trendsetter or well ahead of its time. Before the CW's version of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the Spider-Verse, and Everything Everywhere All At Once, Fringe was already running a years-long plot about a parallel universe invading our own, only opposed by a bunch of science misfits in an underfunded division of the FBI. Modern pop culture’s fascination with multiverses has deep roots, and at least some of these roots reach back to Fringe.

        *Lovecraft Country* (2020)


















 While Abrams has spent much of the last 13 years in the *Star Wars* mines, he's credited as an executive producer on HBO's adaptation of and sequel to Matt Ruff's 2016 horror novel. More people should watch this show (and/or read the book), which threads the needle between cosmic horror and southern Gothic in ways that would've made the real H.P. Lovecraft deeply uncomfortable.

Atticus Freeman (Jonathan Majors, and I get it if that's a dealbreaker) is a Korean War vet in '50s Chicago who takes a road trip to Georgia with his uncle (Courtney B. Vance) and his ex (Jurnee Smollett) to find his missing father. That puts them into direct conflict with white vigilantes, old money, and older magic.

The End of Oak Street (2026)

Apparently this is the summer to revisit old COVID paranoia. The Last House landed on Netflix with a dull, wet thud, but the guy who made the sleeper horror hit It Follows is here to break that curse.

The End of Oak Street sees Denise and Greg Platt (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor) suddenly transported from their nice suburban neighborhood to dinosaur country. There's maybe a 25% chance this will end up being connected to Cloverfield somehow, but in the meantime, it's small-town Americans vs. prehistory in a battle of survival. Look for it to hit your local theater this Friday.