Christmas 2027 has acquired a man with a chicken under his hat. Amazon MGM Studios has set a theatrical release date of 25 December 2027 for Lizard Music, the live-action and CGI hybrid that Benny Safdie has written and directed from Daniel Pinkwater’s much-loved 1976 children’s novel. Dwayne Johnson plays the Chicken Man, an eccentric in his seventies, with extensive makeup and prosthetics doing the ageing. That is the US release; a UK date has yet to be announced.
If you read Pinkwater’s book at the right age, it probably rewired something in you permanently. Young Victor is left more or less to his own devices when his parents head off on holiday and his older sister takes a relaxed view of her babysitting duties. Free to stay up for the late-night B movies, he discovers that once the film ends his television starts showing lizards, real ones rather than men in rubber suits, playing otherworldly music. In the nearby city of Hogboro he falls in with the Chicken Man, whose companion is Claudia, an unusually intelligent hen who lives under his hat, and who seems to know a good deal more about the lizards than he is letting on. The trail eventually leads to a floating island, and to the question of whether the lizards are from outer space or some other sort of space entirely.
The film reunites Johnson with Safdie after The Smashing Machine, in which he played the MMA fighter Mark Kerr, and it continues his conspicuous campaign to stop being cast as a man who punches helicopters. Johnson visibly slimmed down for the part and has said he sat through five hours of makeup a day to play a man in his seventies. After years of franchise films in which the laws of physics were treated as a loose suggestion, a septuagenarian who keeps poultry on his head is arguably the more plausible role.
The supporting cast is a properly odd and rather wonderful bunch: Theo Clark Leber, Alicia Silverstone, Tim Heidecker, Arya Parvathi, Regina Hall, Colman Domingo, Rachel McAdams, Andrew Dice Clay, David Krumholtz and Jeff Goldblum, who having survived dinosaurs is presumably unfazed by a few musical lizards. Scott Stuber and Nick Nesbitt produce for United Artists, alongside Safdie for Out for the Count, Johnson for Seven Bucks Productions and David Koplan for Magnetic Fields Entertainment.
The date puts Lizard Music a week behind the 17 December 2027 pile-up of Avengers: Secret Wars, The Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum and The Housemaid’s Secret, which makes it the oddball family alternative for anyone who has had their fill of superheroes and hobbits by Christmas. A whimsical festive family film from one half of the brothers who made Uncut Gems would have sounded like a typo five years ago. Then again, so would “the Rock, in old-age prosthetics, with a hen under his hat”. Pinkwater, one suspects, would approve of both.
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