Stephen King’s ‘80s horror story, The Monkey, is heading to the big screen with a release date of February 21, 2025.
Neon announced the date with an eerie poster for the film on X/Twitter today, promising to deliver the latest adaptation of King’s work early next year. The picture doesn’t reveal much about how it will bring the short story to moviegoers, but it does set the tone with a creepy look at its titular, cymbal-clapping monkey toy.
Aside from King, it's got some big names behind it as well. James Wan, the horror veteran behind Saw, The Conjuring, Insidious, and blockbusters like Aquaman and Furious 7, is producing, while Longlegs filmmaker Osgood Perkins is directing.
Stephen King, James Wan, and Osgood Perkins.
— NEON (@neonrated) June 21, 2024
THE MONKEY.
February 21, 2025 pic.twitter.com/NQvqPq57P5
Perkins opened up about The Monkey during a recent interview with Bloody Disgusting. He explains that, while Longlegs is poised to terrorize audiences when it releases next month, his King adaptation promises something different.
“It’s gonna feel more like Misery or Creepshow or Gremlins or American Werewolf,” Perkins said. “It couldn’t be LESS like Longlegs. To me, if you’re gonna make a movie about a toy monkey, you can be serious about it. But so much of King is funny and nostalgic feeling. So we tried to make a movie that felt a little bit more like something from the late ’80s – ’90s. It’s sorta like, if Robert Zemeckis had just like a LITTLE bit of acid and made a Stephen King picture about a monkey toy.”
The Monkey is centered on two twin brothers named Hal and Bill after they find an old monkey toy that has been hidden in an attic. When deaths begin to crop up around them, they work together to detroy the toy for good. Its cast includes names like Theo James (The Divergent Series, The Gentlemen), Elijah Wood (The Lord of the Rings, Yellowjackets), Tatiana Maslany (She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, Orphan Black), Rohan Campbell (Halloween Ends, The Hardy Boys), and Sarah Levy (Schitt’s Creek, SurrealEstate).
“For me, ideally it’s the movie that kids and their parents wanna go see together,” Perkins adds. “People blow up, people explode; it’s very extreme but it’s very funny. It’s very father-son redemption, it’s very touching, it’s very nostalgic, it’s very Stephen King.”
The Monkey premieres early next year. For a better look at Perkins’ work, you can read our Longlegs review. We gave the Nicolas Cage and Maika Monroe-led film a 7/10, saying, “Osgood Perkins puts a Satanic spin on The Silence of the Lambs in Longlegs, an unnerving, stylishly crafted serial-killer thriller with a bizarre supernatural twist.”
Michael Cripe is a freelance contributor with IGN. He started writing in the industry in 2017 and is best known for his work at outlets such as The Pitch, The Escapist, OnlySP, and Gameranx.
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