THE MONKEY Is Coming This February

We find this hard to believe, but Stephen King wrote a story in the 80s that WASN’T turned into a movie immediately afterward. In fact, it’s never been filmed at all. You might assume something about it made it unfilmable, like how Gerald’s Game had to wait until the invention of Netflix because no studio wanted to make a movie about a woman handcuffed to a bed for two hours. But we don’t see anything about THE MONKEY that would bring up the same concerns.

The Monkey is, indeed, about a monkey. Specifically those ancient toy monkeys with the wide grin and the cymbals — the type that look eerie already and you don’t have to be Stephen King to base a horror story around. But the man did once, and James Wan‘s production company is taking on the overdue task of giving this monkey his movie.

The monkey of The Monkey is picked up by two brothers who find it in an attic and don’t realize that it’s cursed. When people start dying around them, they start to think “maybe it’s the monkey” and try to think up ways to destroy the toy. But it’s not going to be as simple as that…

“For me, ideally it’s the movie that kids and their parents wanna go see together,” director Osgood Perkins (Longlegs) told the website Bloody Disgusting. “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 will be distributed by NEON and is set to be released February 21, 2025.