According to Deadline, Amazon MGM has set Dwayne Johnson's Lizard Music for Christmas Day 2027, which is the slot a studio hands to the movie it believes will make the whole family sit down. The live-action/CGI hybrid is directed by Benny Safdie from his own adaptation of Daniel Pinkwater's novel.
The plot is the pitch. A boy stumbles on a secret late-night broadcast of lizards playing otherworldly music and is then adopted into the household of the Chicken Man, an eccentric septuagenarian Johnson will play with "extensive makeup and prosthetics," per the release. The Chicken Man's companion is an 85-year-old chicken named Claudia, and the pitch materials describe the boy and the old man as "kindred spirits," which is what you call it when the old man's best friend is poultry. The supporting cast is assembled like a prestige-picture call sheet: Jeff Goldblum, Rachel McAdams, Alicia Silverstone, Regina Hall, Colman Domingo, Tim Heidecker, and Andrew Dice Clay, a man who has spent four decades being nothing other than himself and will now be surrounded by CGI geckos. Scott Stuber produces alongside Johnson's Seven Bucks, which has built its reputation on turning real men into bigger ones.
The opening date does the real work. Amazon says a "Christmas launchpad is ideal in reaching family audiences," and the film lands on the same day as Ron Howard's Alone at Dawn with Adam Driver and Anne Hathaway and a Nancy Meyers picture, two weeks after Avengers: Secret Wars. That is how you know the bet is real: the studio is not asking which family will watch a lizard-music movie. It is asking which family will not.
YOUR TURN: Christmas Day 2027, against Secret Wars plus two. Which family is watching the lizard broadcast, and which one is already at the exit?
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