It’s not every day in this business that a movie gets announced with a pretty stacked cast from a well-known filmmaker that you know nothing about. That’s the case with NEON’s upcoming release of The Monkey. The film releases in theaters on February 21st, 2025. It comes from a short story by Stephen King and is written and directed by Osgood Perkins. Perkins directed the upcoming Longlegs.
It stars Theo James, Tatiana Maslany, Elijah Wood, Christian Convery, Colin O’Brien, Rohan Campbell, and Sarah Levy. It’s produced by James Wan, Michael Clear, Dave Caplan, Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, and Chris Ferguson.
Now I say we don’t know anything about the film, but we can discern a bit from the King short story. Here’s a short synopsis of that story.
The story begins with two young brothers, Peter and Dennis, finding a cymbal-banging monkey toy in the attic of their great uncle’s house. Soon, it is revealed how their father, Hal, discovered the toy monkey inside an antique chest owned by his father (Hal’s father was a merchant mariner who disappeared under mysterious circumstances; Hal suspects that the monkey led to his father’s disappearance). The monkey is actually cursed, and every time it claps the mechanical cymbals together, someone close to Hal dies. Hal was tormented by the monkey as a child. He helplessly watched as the toy worked its lethal enchantment onto his family and killed them off, until Hal chucked it down an old well at the home of his uncle. In the present, Hal takes the monkey and throws it into Crystal Lake, hoping that it will be finished for good and never kill anyone again. The story ends with an excerpt from a newspaper article, which reports the mysterious death of many fish in the lake.
We’ll keep you updated on this movie as we get more information.
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