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.
THE MONKEY. February 21, 2025 pic.twitter.
com/NQvqPq57P5 — NEON (@neonrated) June 21, 2024 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 .
